General Education Assessment

For Scorers

Over 200 full-time and part-time faculty have participated in general education assessment scoring. Scorer feedback has been very positive. Scorers say they would recommend participating in the process to their colleagues. Most respondents report that their participation makes an impact on their teaching and assessment practices. One stated "In scoring, I have gained a better understanding of university learning outcomes and how to work toward these within the courses I teach."

A call goes out to faculty, via department chairs and our email and online newsletter, once or twice a year requesting voluntary participation in the scoring process. Scorers attend a workshop for using the rubric that will be used to score student work for general education assessment. Then, scorers complete the bulk of the scoring independently. All scorers must attend all workshop sessions for the rubrics they will be using. Scorers can typically expect to commit around 10 hours of time for the workshop and the scoring, and the total number of hours required for a particular round of scoring is provided in each call for participants.

Norming Workshops

During the workshops, an overview of the General Education Assessment process is presented, as well as the rubric(s) with which the student work collected will be scored. Scorers will have the opportunity to read exemplar work products and practice scoring the work with the rubric(s). A rich discussion between the scorers about the rubrics and student work follows the practice scoring. Scorers are then paired with a partner to read the assignment prompts for the work they will be scoring and discuss the prompts and the application of the rubric to each assignment. The workshop both introduces the scorers to using the rubric and works toward increasing the inter-rater reliability of the scoring process.

Scoring

At the end of the norming workshops, scorers are provided with digital copies of student work, assignments, rubrics, a score spreadsheet, and instructions for scoring. Scorers are then given 1.5 to 2 weeks to complete their scoring (around 6 hours) and then return scores, feedback forms, and flash drives to the General Education Assessment office.

Of interest