Assessment Structure Overview

In the interest of sharing, Twitter handle @MsSteel_Maths recently published a blog on her workplace's assessment, and I thought I'd do the same.

First of all, whether an assessment policy or procedure will be effective really depends on your place of work. I work in a 6th form college with over 600 students studying AS / A2 Maths on 3 x 1.5hr lessons a week, with an average class size of approximately 24. There will be cases where something that works in an institution where there are class sizes of 10-12, but this may not scale-up well to those of 24 and would be a struggle to adapt.

Students are expected to focus on maths outside of class for 4.5hrs a week (the same amount of time they get for lessons). Part of this is a weekly homework, while the rest of the time is undirected. Students can use this time to build revision cards and crib sheets, work through textbook exercises and practice papers, watch teaching videos, or attend one of our daily lunchtime workshops that are run by one of the maths team on a rota. How many students actually focus on maths for the full 4.5hrs a week is unknown and can't be checked, and I'm sure that the majority will not follow this religiously. However, I believe that to go some way to building independent learners, we need to have the trust to let students organise part of their own revision.

Our assessment policy currently looks like this:

• Students sit three summative assessments (graded mocks) during the year: one in October, one in January, and one in March. These dates are set by the college to coincide with subject reviews and parent evenings. These are marked by the teacher and the grades are inputted into the college's database.
• Students complete a weekly homework that is made up of rigorous practice and past paper questions, which is accessed, with the solutions, from the VLE. Students work through the problems and self-mark their work. Any problems the students have should be brought to the lunchtime workshop prior to hand-in (if they managed to be organised enough not to do it the night before). Teachers take these in for a quick once-over, before recording on the database whether it has been completed (2 - all present and correct, 1 - parts missing or not marked and corrected, 0 - MIA), and then handed back to the student.
• Students are tested once a week to assess how confident they were with the homework. The test is short, between 10-15 marks, and takes only about 15-20 minutes of the start of a lesson. These are taken in and then marked by the teacher. The scores are recorded on the database and the tests are then returned to the students.

The reason I started investigating other colleges' practices was due to the workload. Although the weekly test is a quick and easy thing to mark by itself, when scaled up to 5 classes of 24 students each, that's 120 tests a week to mark and then record alongside all of the pieces of homework. It can take up to an hour a week to record all of the homework completion and the scores for 120 tests on the college database, and that's without actually marking them! This is time that could be devoted to planning, which sadly takes a backseat in order to keep on top of this weekly routine.

Please share any suggestions you may have that would help. What are we missing?