Campus Talks: How to create university assessment that serves learning

What purpose does, or should, assessment serve? How can educators shift the focus of assessment towards feedback? Who is really driving higher education’s unhelpful obsession with grades? And how does GenAI affect all this?

In this episode of Campus Talks, we explore all these questions and more with David Boud, Deakin distinguished professor at Deakin University and a leading scholar on assessment and feedback. David is foundation director of Deakin’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning and emeritus professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

He has been a pioneer in learning-centred approaches to assessment and is one of the most highly cited academics in the world on teaching, learning and assessment in higher and professional education with dozens of books bearing his name, including The Impact of Feedback in Higher Education (2019) and Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education (2022).

We discuss what constitutes good feedback, strategies for engaging students in the feedback process, how to design assessments that centre feedback and learning and where universities have been going wrong on assessment and grading.

For more advice on these topics from educators all over the world, head to our spotlight guide on reframing assessment as part of learning.