29 Flexible assessments

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became obvious that flexibility is a critical factor for fostering trust and a sense of belonging in the classroom. This flexibility is also helpful in case of weather events or other disruptions. Here are some ways to build flexibility in your course while promoting an inclusive learning environment and supporting student success:

• Make your course schedule more flexible: provide flexible due windows for assignments; incorporate grace periods; have students choose their deadlines and sign up for them; share a revisable, dynamic calendar with your students.
• Consult the BMindful calendar, which lists significant holy days for several faiths during which adherents may not go to work or school. We want to acknowledge that it is a starting point and not inclusive of all holidays (e.g., Lunar New Year). Consulting with interfaith calendars is important when planning assignments and assessments for a diverse classroom. Try to avoid scheduling high-stakes exams on major holy days or create options for students who will need alternative times. You can also add the calendar to your Outlook or Google Calendar.

• Scaffold major summative assessments throughout the course and design more frequent low-stakes formative assignments. This strategy helps to spread out the assessment and grading burden throughout the semester and provides many opportunities for students to receive timely, constructive, and respectful feedback.

• To ensure the inclusivity of assessments, we recommend being flexible with question types on exams. To support your students in times of distress and bolster their information retrieval skills, consider holding take-home and/or open-book exams that are focused on higher-order thinking such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (see Bloom’s taxonomy). Some instructors assign video submissions for take-home exams where students record videos through UICapture or Flipgrid and submit them to ICON as part of their final.

💡 Please reflect:

Think of ways to make your summative high-stakes assignment more flexible for your students and plan for them.

We would like to acknowledge that implementing strategies for flexibility could potentially result in a lot of extra work for instructors with minority status compared to their colleagues.