Virtual roadshow showcases effective assessment practices across the UK

Following the success of our inaugural Assessment & Feedback Roadshow in March, our latest Roadshow week (14-18 September) saw a series of more than two dozen presentations from colleagues and institutions across the UK showcasing their innovative work in our second virtual tour of approaches feedback and assessment.

STRUCTURES OF ENHANCEMENT

A number of our speakers addressed the need to have structures, mechanisms and strategic approaches in place to support and promote enhancements and innovations. Warwick's Will Haywood and Dr Samantha Read introduced the work – and considered the impacts of – their institution's Assessment Lab, a space for experimentation, innovation and collaboration in assessment and feedback, supported by a team of so-called "assessment geeks". They stressed the importance of getting assessment right: "we have a lot of decisions to make around assessment and the knock-on of these has repercussions for our students and their lives ahead". They added that changing contexts – such as generative AI – and growing class sizes can present difficult assessment design challenges, which require innovation and experimentation: "There are complex problems and they probably need complex solutions." Their 90-minute Assessment Lab sessions offer a space open to anyone across their institution, a participant-led forum for collaborative, people-centred problem-solving, emphasising a design-thinking approach with opportunities for discussion and reflection – often leading to further focused conversations and support sessions. These are not, they said, taught sessions; they're not filled with presentations; and they don't claim to hold all the answers. They provide a safe space, a place to experiment, test ideas, take risks and discuss what colleagues are working on, facilitated by staff – the self-styled geeks – who "are enthusiastic about assessment and enjoy talking about it".

Manchester Metropolitan's Dr Amanda Miller, Dr Alice Graeupl and Dr Tim Gabriel also showcased the development of an institutional environment created to drive authentic and flexible assessment practice, through the adoption of a new curriculum and assessment framework which has created an opportunity for resilient, future-ready assessment strategies and innovative authentic assessments. They explained how this work has been supported by their institution's Innovative Scholar Scheme, which has run since 2023 and involves colleagues in three core roles: lead scholars (approximatively 10 of whom, each on 0.4 FTE, drive cross-university initiatives on two-year secondments), associate scholars (30 of whom, each on 0.1 FTE, lead departmental/faculty innovation for specific groups for one year) and alumni scholars (comprising lead scholars who have completed the scheme, who act as mentors for the next cohort). They described the scheme as "a means to socialise institutional strategy to create AI-resilient authentic assessment" – by driving flexible practice across faculties and disciplines, through workshops, events and involvement in portfolio review processes, supporting a community of practice as a space to showcase and share work, to develop a culture of conversation and innovation and to build confidence in the adoption of new pedagogical approaches.

Meanwhile, the University of Law's Helen Coleman introduced approaches to the development of a future‑ready ecosystem of coherent, future‑proof assessment architectures informed by shifts towards programme‑level assessment redesign, digital assessment ecosystems and AI‑resilient task construction. The future of assessment, she said, lies not in redesigning individual tasks but in building assessment ecosystems – "the interconnected assessment experience students encounter across a programme" – designed to take into account the importance of such factors as integrity and authenticity, as we seek to demonstrate evidence of learning in increasingly complex assessment environments. She observed that individual assessments can be perfectly designed in themselves, but that if we fail to see a structure of assessments holistically at a programme level then that structure can become repetitive and unstimulating and can end up testing the same learning outcomes again and again. By contrast, an ecosystem-focused model allows us to consider "what evidence of capability is being built across the whole programme". As such, she stressed, "graduate capability becomes the organising principle, and assessment becomes the mechanism for building capability over time".

Explaining how her institution's enhancement work has resulted in increased first-attempt pass rates and reductions in applications for extenuating circumstances, the University of the Arts London's Samantha Elliott explored the assessment enhancement process conducted in the context of a shared second-year undergraduate module in Collective and Collaborative Practice undertaken by approximately 1,200 students across three different schools. She considered how the project facilitated pedagogic discussion across those schools, included cross-course benchmarking and moderation, supported clarity of assessment and feedback, identified issues through the provision involved, explored potential modifications and enabled change – demonstrating how collaborative, evidence-informed dialogue among staff can drive institutional change, strengthen inclusive assessment and assessment literacy, improve engagement and success, and support sustainable educational development. She emphasised that staff valued the opportunity for reflection and pedagogic discussion, as well as the opportunity to build trust between course teams and wider networks. She also noted that the process had improved staff assessment literacy and pedagogic discussion, and had inspired broader engagement across the sector.

Birmingham City's Dr Emma Ransome introduced an approach to reducing awarding gaps through structural assessment reform rather than student deficit interventions. She explained that this approach had involved a data-informed review of attainment and awarding outcomes, and that the resulting framework for transformative assessment had led to a 4.4 per cent reduction in departmental attainment gaps. She described how, by using disaggregated data to identify modules with the largest disparities, course teams had examined assessment design, feedback processes, and formative support, and developed rebalanced assessment weightings, enhanced scaffolding, improved assessment sequencing and clearer assessment roadmaps. Rather than treating awarding gaps as phenomena that should be located within particular courses or with specific groups of students, they had considered the systemic issues underpinning them, in order to develop process architectures to address structural inequities, moving from data reporting to an attitude of data inquiry – through intersectional analysis, structural interrogation and actionable intervention planning – and thereby mandating a whole-provider approach where responsibility operates at executive, faculty, course and module levels simultaneously. Their structural analysis revealed that curriculum designs had been based on outmoded model of the traditional student and hadn't been built around the diversity of the students who were actually using them – leading to issues with hidden academic expectations, narrow assessment modes, limited authenticity, weak transitions, differences in confidence and belonging, and structural pressures on commuter students, those with employment and caring responsibilities, and those with digital and financial constraints. In response to these findings, the team had strengthened transition activities, reviewed assessment designs and worked on building staff capability in this area. This resulted not only in a reduction in attainment gaps, but also in greater staff confidence in interpreting and acting on attainment data, and a stronger embedding of APP principles into curriculum and assessment practices. "Staff conversations changed," she said. "Attainment gaps stopped being viewed as isolated student issues and instead became understood as indicators of institutional systems requiring redesign. For me, that cultural shift was just as important as the statistical change." She argued that this has implications for lifelong learning, insofar as awarding gaps shape long-term educational and professional trajectories: "When students repeatedly encounter systems that signal exclusion or misrecognition, this affects their lifelong participation in education and professional development – including confidence, continuation, employability, progression and future engagement with learning." This, she supposed, is why we must move beyond deficit narratives, use data diagnostically not performatively, embed intersectional analysis, connect data to curriculum and assessment design, build staff capability not just dashboards, and treat equality of opportunity as a core academic practice. Ultimately, she concluded, this isn't just about whether students succeed within this system, but is about whether we are designing systems which give students equitable opportunities to succeed.

Within the context of Scotland's Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework, Edinburgh Napier's Dr Cameron Graham offered an overview of transformations in assessment practices towards more meaningful, relevant and authentic assessment that seeks to support learner diversity and skills development. He introduced the Transforming Assessment Policy and Practice in Scotland initiative, a project run as part of Scotland's Tertiary Enhancement Programme (funded by SFC and jointly managed by QAA Scotland and CDN). The project, he explained, has been working to capture existing effective assessment practice, develop an evidence base and a portfolio of resources to encourage and enable policy change, to increase awareness and the sharing of best practice across the Scottish tertiary sector in innovative, inclusive and diverse methods of student-centred assessment, and to influence widespread and sustained change in assessment practice. The project's Assessment Policy Review has identified a need for clearer transparency and delineation between policy and guidance in assessment policies, for more accessible policies, and for institutions and their policies to be more anticipatory of student needs and to acknowledge the diversity of students and their needs relating to assessment.

BRIEFS, RUBRICS & DESCRIPTORS

Several of the week's speakers stressed the importance of getting right the key information provided to students about their assessments. KCL's Jayne Pearson reported on the outcomes of her institution's university-wide audit of rubric use, involving paid student partners as part of an institutional assessment change project. The audit had looked at consistency of practice across programmes, departments and faculties, and areas where rubric use was exemplary and where it was problematic. It had highlighted the inaccessibility of rubrics on module VLE pages, a reliance on generic university or department rubrics, and unhelpful language within descriptors which didn't help students to understand standards. It had also identified good practice in how modules included guidance to supplement rubrics, and in how clear analytic assessment-level or programme-specific assessment-type rubrics were used. Citing a student Staff Partner Reflections report, she emphasised that "a clear rubric turns a grade into something we can work towards, and feedback into something we can act on" – and that "clear accessible rubrics are a matter of fairness". Inclusivity, she stressed, isn't just about how we design assessments – it's about how we prepare students for them – and she explained how positive correlations can be seen between rubric coverage and student satisfaction scores, particularly in areas with assessment-specific rubrics. She went on to share a number of recommendations that had come out of the audit. These included recommendations to consolidate rubrics, marking criteria and AI guidance into one easy-to-find document on each module page, to use defined language and complete, standardised bands, to make every rubric downloadable, recolourable and useable with assistive technology, to keep rubrics assessment- or module-specific, to include a short note on what a rubric is and how to use it, and to consider incorporating guidance on appropriate AI use into rubrics and adjusting marking criteria to award students for areas of learning that GenAI cannot perform well on.

York St John's Dr Chris Whiting talked about the processes and impacts of engaging students, students' union officers, and library, study skills and academic colleagues in co-creating competency-based assessment descriptors for inclusive learning – to enhance assessment literacy, support authentic assessment design, and translate policy into meaningful classroom practice. Acknowledging the value of Jayne Pearson's focus on assessment-level rubrics, he stressed that generic assessment descriptors and associated criteria also matter more than we might think. He supposed that they should not only be used for assessors to support the processes of assessing students' work, but should also be made accessible to inform students' understanding of their assessments. To make this possible, he pointed out, it may be necessary to modify those descriptors, avoiding subjective, overly judgmental and deficit language, ensuring they are inclusive, student-centred and competency-based, and, as appropriate, shifting from the assessment of product to that of process.

As well as rubrics and descriptors, our speakers stressed the importance of clear and coherent assessment criteria. Bath's Dr Rhiannon Edwards talked about the work of developing a coherent, standardised assessment ecosystem to strengthen assessment design, assessment literacy and consistency in academic standards. She stressed the importance of aligning with OfS conditions of registration, responding to NSS feedback and student concerns, and supporting an inclusive teaching and learning agenda by ensuring that assessment criteria are inclusive to all students. Her research had found that half of staff did not use assessment criteria tailored to each assessment, and that 40 per cent of students felt that assessments did not relate to criteria, and that students struggled to interpret vague or generic criteria and often perceived feedback lacked actionable guidance. She explained how as a result her institution has developed a structure of generic and specific assessment criteria and a framework marking scheme. She detailed a set of 12 areas of faculty-level generic assessment criteria: subject knowledge and understanding; critical thinking, application of theoretical knowledge and understanding; problem solving; reflective practice; practical competence; research design and application; written communication; oral communication; response to questioning; formatting of citations; and formatting of reference lists.

Taking a rather more counterintuitive approach, Lincoln's Professor Jo Rushworth, Dr Kevin Jacques, Dr Neil Holden, Dr Claire Walker and Dr Andy Gilbert spoke of the use of "unexemplars" as an empowering and efficient way to engage whole cohorts in assessment for learning as part of a flipped feed-in approach. They explained that – unlike an exemplar (an example of a good or ideal piece of work that is given to students as a guide) – an unexemplar is a piece of work that is deliberately laden with the sorts of mistakes or omissions that students might typically make. Rather than providing students with staff-led feedback at the end of a summative assessment, this approach engages students to generate their own feed-in by grading unexemplars against marking rubrics to inform their summative submission. They observed that the use of unexemplars can usefully tackle a number of key issues faced by institutions across the sector: they significantly enhance feedback practice, empower students as partners, enhance assessment and feedback literacy, save a significant amount of staff time in marking and answering queries (and are particularly useful, for example, for large cohorts, students new to university and international students), permit co-creation and testing of rubrics, promote error framing, help to surface misconceptions prior to hand-in, and have been shown to boost student satisfaction and student outcomes and to narrow awarding gaps. During their session, they performed examples of two student presentations: one with good content but showing poor delivery; one with poor content but good delivery. They explained how when they've performed these live for students in class it both reassures students anxious about giving their own presentations and emphasises the importance of content in the assessment process. They reported that all students said they had found this approach useful and that 92 per cent said the exercise made them feel more confident – adding that the module pass rate had increased from 88 per cent to 93 per cent.

FEEDBACK & FEEDFORWARD

At the other end of the assessment process from assignment briefs and preparatory information, effective feedback is also key to ongoing student success – and Thursday was the Roadshow's feedback day, featuring four presentations on the subject.

Roehampton's Dr Sue Reeves and Dr Mandy Gault shared a practical, sector-relevant approach to strengthening assessment and feedback through a coherent assessment-feedback cycle designed to support both staff consistency and student learning, through an integrated model combining an Academic Assessment Guide, a structured feedback template, and reflective approaches to improving student engagement – and responding to such key sector priorities as assessment literacy and the need for clear, consistent expectations around the use of generative AI in assessment. They noted that the scale, diversity and professional accreditation requirements of their provision had created a need for consistent and transparent assessment and feedback processes that would support both staff and students. "We wanted greater consistency but we also wanted constructive alignment at all levels," they said, noting that external examiner feedback had highlighted variability in assessment information and feedback (while some staff, for example, gave limited feedback, others "wrote essays") and that this created potential risks to equity and quality assurance, and therefore highlighted the need to build consistency and coherence in that information and feedback. Importantly, they also wanted students to engage with and act on feedback. To support this, they produced a template for their Assessment Guide to ensure that students knew exactly what they needed to do for each peace of assessment on a module and that staff knew what they needed to provide. They found that, when this was presented this consistently across modules, students would know what to look for, and that this increased their confidence. They also introduced a standardised feedback structure, whereby staff were asked to provide at least two distinct in-text comments per page directly on the piece of work, plus general comments giving one to three points on the strengths of the assessment and one two three comments giving areas for improvement (including feedforward) – adding that further detail should then be provided according to the assessment criteria outlined in the assessment guidelines, using those criteria as headings. Having clarified assessment expectations through the Assessment Guide and strengthened the clarity and purpose of feedback, this Assessment-Feedback cycle then went on to develop student engagement with feedback through reflective approaches which underpinned understanding. They noted that their external examiners observed that these innovations had made it easier to navigate modules and find assessment information, that this initiative received strong staff buy-in, and that their NSS scores on assessment and feedback increased by 2.5 percentage points.

Consistency and clarity were recognised as crucial to the effective use of feedback. Nottingham Trent's Dr Glen Kirkham and Dr Karin Garrie looked at their department's development of an integrated feedforward approach to help students connect feedback across assessments and years of study, through the mapping of key skills and knowledge across all years of study, with the creation of a list of key feedforward skills generated for each course. They explained that they'd wanted to find a method that links the feedback students have gained with the assessments they'll be doing in the future, while scaffolding learning through a richly varied assessment diet and exploring continuous and authentic models of assessment alongside more traditional models. They noted that students could often struggle, when working between different modes of assessment, in understanding to how best to apply their feedback in the future (for example, how to use feedback on a presentation when going on to complete a social media assignment, or feedback on a written report when deploying knowledge and reasoning in a viva or exam), and can therefore benefit from tailored and directed information, communicated in the clearest ways possible. They did this by first listing a set of core skills which could be tracked across assessments, modules and levels, and then be clearly mapped and supported through tutorials and course sessions.

Meanwhile, Dr Helen Paterson was joined by her colleague from the University of Glasgow's School of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dr Phil McAleer, to describe how computational approaches can enhance assessment and feedback. They explained how their department has developed flexible feedback processes that prioritise the design and usability of feedback, making it more informative, actionable and engaging for students, and their introduction of methods for efficiently extracting and analysing feedback, enabling staff to generate more meaningful class-level feedback and identify common patterns to inform future enhancements. They identified a number of problems with individual feedback sheets: multiple documents are cumbersome to work with; individual feedback sheets make it harder to moderate after marking and to check for consistency, accuracy and completeness; they are restrictive in that layout is predetermined before marking starts; and they make it harder for markers to reflect on all the feedback they gave unless the process is stored and reviewed. The goals of their initiative were to make feedback more effective for student development, showing where grades come from and how students can improve in their next assignments – and (by making the process of feedback more efficient for staff) to reduce the number of documents being worked with, to improve consistency across students, and to allow space for deeper reflection on the feedback by markers, to help develop future iterations of their teaching – and to increase the effectiveness of, and satisfaction in, feedback for their students. Their data analysis showed, for example, that higher-grade students were getting less (and less detailed) feedback than those on lower grades, and demonstrated a very broad range in the number and length of the on-script comments students were receiving from markers (a range from zero to 63 comments per report in the analysis they shared, with a range of zero to 145 words per comment). This dataset had then given their team the opportunity to discuss and address such inconsistencies. In short, they said, their take-home message was that feedback is data – the hard part, they added, is just getting it into a useable format.

Also that day, the University of the West of England's Dr Elias Pimenidis looked at an approach to enhancing formative feedback through generative AI and international peer learning to underpin integrity, inclusivity and sustainability – whereby AI is used to support engagement with tutor feedback and strengthen feedforward practices, helping students apply learning both within a module and in subsequent studies – designed for domestic provision and also for rollout to transnational delivery. This initiative was developed in response to an institutional strategic need for inclusive assessment and feedback, the student use of GenAI for inappropriate purposes, and relatively low attendance rates, and has aimed to establish clear boundaries for responsible AI use and to use AI to strengthen formative feedback and student support, harnessing the potential of Generative AI to improve inclusivity by providing more effective and accessible feedback – using GenAI for student-actioned feedback, alongside the use of in-class peer feedback. He explained that it was expected that this initiative would result in students' professional skillsets becoming better aligned with the current and upcoming requirements of the job market, and that, as graduates, they will be more adaptive and respond with minimal inertia to changes and new challenges that the continuing evolution of technology will bring to the workplace.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Generative AI of course continues to inform and motivate new thinking in the area of assessment strategies. SOAS's Dr Mark J. P. Kerrigan, Reading's Dr Sian Lindsay and Bloomsbury Exchange's Sarah Sherman detailed the outputs of a QAA‑funded Collaborative Enhancement Project addressing the challenges of assessment design in the age of AI – a project which has developed and piloted a practical Assessment Toolkit to support programme teams in creating secure, inclusive and authentic assessments, to embed AI‑aware and future‑focused assessment practices at the programme level. "We're starting to think of programme design right from the beginning," they explained – rather than retrofitting provision in response to AI. "Generative AI has magnified a long-standing assessment problem: What happens when we value the final product too much? If students can use AI to produce or polish the final output, the final output (on its own) may no longer give us enough assurance about what learning has happened, raising questions about the validity of our assessments, as well as the integrity of our qualifications." At the same time, AI has also, they noted, introduced a scaling problem in relation to the large-scale redesign of assessment. They went on to introduce the toolkit they have developed to address these challenges, involving guidance on discursive writing and evidence synthesis, cumulative and reflective writing, collaborative and social construction, applied/scenario-based practice, and oral and multimedia communication.

Westminster's Stephen Bunbury also spoke about ways to futureproof assessment through authentic, inclusive and AI-aware approaches designed to enhance feedback quality, accessibility and academic integrity, integrating responsible AI use, inclusive curriculum principles and real-world assessment tasks to improve student engagement and outcomes. What, he asked, do we do practically when redesigning assessment? How can inclusion become a natural by-product of authentic assessment? How should academic and quality colleagues work together to we make assessment authentic through quality processes? "Start with what students genuinely need to demonstrate," he said. "Authentic tasks focus on application, judgement, communication and professional or disciplinary practice. When unnecessary barriers are removed, the assessment can become more inclusive as a natural by-product. Inclusion is therefore designed in from the outset rather than added afterwards… Just because the assessment is different doesn't mean the standards are lowered. We can still assess the same skills, but we're doing it differently." He gave an example of redesigning a traditional essay assessment as a conference-style presentation. This, he said, afforded authenticity in the ways in which students communicated, synthesised evidence, exercised judgement and responded to questions; and it was inclusive in that it allowed students to demonstrate learning by more than one mode with clearer staging and feedforward opportunities. He also advised that academics should work with quality staff – and benefit from their expertise – from the start of assessment redesign processes, not just at the point at which the modification needs approval: "Don't treat quality as a barrier to thinking about different ideas… Treat quality assurance as part of good assessment design rather than as a final hurdle."

Coventry's Dr Gloria Oliomogbe considered the use of AI in project management practice in an authentic and professionally relevant manner, reflecting on the value of taking a critical, analytical and problem-solving skills approach to formative and summative assessment – adding that we first need to think about what those skills actually are, in order to make assessment and feedback processes meaningful.

AUDIOVISUAL APPROACHES

Also from Coventry, Dr Stella Nalwanga – while taking a very different approach and working through a very different medium – also advanced ways to use assessment to support the development of critical and reflective learners. She noted that higher education is changing rapidly with graduates expected to be able to demonstrate not only subject knowledge but also critical thinking skills – and that there are also increasing emphases on the use of assessment as part of the active processes of learning, and on the roles of students as active participants (rather than as passive recipients) in feedback processes. She argued that extra-curricular podcasting can offer one way to enhance assessment and feedback practices in higher education, proposing that, by fostering engagement, autonomy and dialogue, podcasts help develop students' feedback literacy, critical thinking, and communication skills, by deepening disciplinary understanding, building confidence, and modelling reflective practices essential for high-quality learning and feedback cultures. She explained that she had introduced podcasting as a mode of formative assessment in order to improve student communication and help her students engage with professional perspectives and feel comfortable talking about things that are important in their industry. "Educational podcasting," she said, "is not simply a student engagement activity. It creates a student-led assessment and feedback ecosystem in which learners generate dialogue, provide and receive feedback, make evaluative judgements about quality, and engage in reflection that develops critical reflective practice."

Richmond American University London's Eilis Tobin and Richard Bevan described how, in response to growing concerns about AI use and changing industry demands, they have similarly integrated podcast production into student assignments – noting that podcasting also offers an alternative mode of expression and assessment providing neurodiverse students, and those who may find traditional written assignments challenging, with opportunities to demonstrate learning in ways that better reflect their strengths. This interdisciplinary teaching initiative came about when they identified a need in the job market for content creation skills – leading their Business School to team up with their Department of Communications and The Arts to combine their industry insight with their creative expertise to create assignments which would be authentic, engaging and resilient to AI, which would be inclusive and have real-world relevance, and which would give students those increasingly valued professional skills. Their pilot project, delivered as a client brief for the charity Professors Without Borders, boosted student confidence, autonomy, creativity, critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork and community-building, and produced a 100 per cent completion rate. Their students responded very positively to the experience: "I sat in class thinking 'at least this is better than writing an essay' – when actually it was the one of the most important classes I took… Without the access and practice I was given for that assignment, I wouldn't be working where I am today."

Moving from audio to video, Aberdeen's Dr Aaron Thom and Dr Mary Pryor introduced their use of an innovative formative assessment designed to scaffold a final summative task on their Principles of Learning & Teaching in Higher Education online course, a mandatory formative assessment whereby students download and use Panopto to record a five-minute video presentation which introduces a teaching session on a class they currently teach or have recently taught. They explained that these videos are reviewed and critiqued by both peers and the course tutor, providing structured, developmental feedback, in order to enable participants to evaluate and refine their digital communication and presentation skills in advance of their fifteen-minute summative assessment, and to support the development of their confidence and competence. They stressed that the peer review exercise has been particularly interesting for the participants, and noted that, while their students didn't always find it an easy process, it clearly supported their progression to the summative assessment stage.

AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT

Alongside these uses of audiovisual technologies in practice-based coursework, the proliferation of Generative AI and increased emphases on the importance of employability skills have accelerated the development of other modes of authentic assessment. Bedfordshire's Dr Diana Pritchard, Brunel's Dr Nicholas Worsfold, Greenwich's Dr Crystal Tsay and Dr Alexander Kofinas from the University of Al Dhaid reported on the key findings of their QAA-funded research into the impacts of assessments of different intensities of authenticity on student grades and experiences. They explained how they had developed a mapping based on 18 criteria relating to product (scoring for task and assessment form) and process (scoring for physical and social aspects) in order to "put a semi-quantitative measure onto how authentic an assessment is". Their research found that there were more authentic assessments at level 6 than at lower levels of study, that assessments tended to score more highly on the product element than on process, and that "the social aspect is the real challenge for all disciplines". They observed that authentic assessments can incur increased resourcing costs, but that both staff and students felt that this was a valuable use of such resources. They noted from student feedback that authentic assessments can allow flexibility and accommodate a diversity of students and learning approaches. They also found that authentic assessment approaches can underpin employability strategies and can be linked to increased confidence in academic integrity. Authentic assessment, they said, is most successful when it is designed to be inclusive, and when students understand its purpose, are properly prepared, have opportunities for formative feedback, and understand how they will be marked.

Glasgow's Dr Helena Paterson, Dr Carolyn Loveridge and Dr Susan Lindsay talked about the use of class debates as an assessment tool for building co-creation, belonging, community and skills development for students. They noted that it is increasingly recognised that students need to develop employability skills and attributes in addition to their subject knowledge, and that debate is important as a forum for the discussion of different perspectives. Debate, they said, requires in-depth subject knowledge, critical thinking, oral communication and language skills, confidence, teamwork, a respect for diversity, resourcefulness, responsibility, ethical and social awareness and adaptability, and the ability to be a reflective learner. Their students reported some initial apprehension at the prospect of having to engage in a debate as part of their assessment, but had felt supported in their preparations, and added: "You're forced to learn together… It gives you a nice broad scope of learning… It's about covering all your bases and understanding the different perspectives… It's a learning opportunity for your to see other groups' points of view." They also reported not only significant learning opportunities but also increased engagement and an enhanced sense of academic community.

Buckinghamshire New University's Dr Uchenna Nweke introduced an assessment-mapping approach designed to enhance authenticity, motivation, and professional engagement, as part of a level 7 module on Entrepreneurship & Business Venturing. The module was aligned with his institution's inaugural BNU International Business Management Conference, and involved a competition whereby high-performing students progressed through internal pitching rounds, with finalists presenting their business ventures to a panel of industry leaders for cash prizes. He explained how assessment design, industry collaboration and live professional contexts were coordinated to enhance authenticity, student motivation and employability outcomes, through an approach informed by QAA's 2018 guidance on Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Education. He explained how the module adopted an assessment-to-practice approach whereby, as the core to the assessment, students' start-up business plans were mapped onto a competitive pitching process, affording students inclusive access to industry and peer-mentor coaching prior to the submission of their summative assessments. He reported that students demonstrated greater engagement, motivation, commitment and professionalism as a result of this process – and that now "many finalists are running businesses based on their pitched ideas".

Supported by Steff Jones from Shaping Portsmouth, Dr Georgiana Busoi described how the work of the University of Portsmouth's Marketing Agency initiative – as an example of "authentic assessment at scale" – has transformed learning, feedback, and local impact through a structured, programme‑wide civic partnership model that connects students, academics, local authorities and business‑support organisations, integrating assessment and feedback with real marketing challenges sourced directly from the local economy. She explained how her institution's marketing provision has embedded authentic assessment in all modules, based on five principles of authentic assessment: industry-relevant learning, inclusive participation, collaborative engagement, employability and lifelong skills, and creative and critical practice. Faced with the challenge of finding a sufficient and sustainable number of live clients for student projects, the Marketing Agency was established in partnership with Portsmouth City Council as part of the Portsmouth Business Support Service to provide an expert resource for local businesses, through consultancy projects, live client cases, internships and part-time employment. She argued that the development of authentic assessment at scale requires three key shifts in emphasis: moving from isolated assessments to ecosystem learning, from employability rhetoric to employability practice, and from a university outreach approach to a model of civic engagement.

In a similarly business-focused venture, Hartpury's Dr Alex Kay explored how the Hartpury Business Hub has shown that authentic, partnership-based assessment can be embedded within the curriculum. and how industry collaboration, live briefs and RKE can drive assessment innovation, staff development, and programme-level impact, while maintaining academic standards and affording students opportunities to be involved in the world of industry that they want to progress onto. Since 2020 Hartpury has developed and grown its Business Hub – a community of practice and a service provider supporting organisations both locally and nationally – as a way to capture the institution's business work, identify the impacts staff and students have on industry, and scale it to get more enterprises involved. He explained that it's a place which organisations can approach to request support on projects and consultancies in such areas as sponsorship, marketing, policy development and internal audits. Their clients have included Sport England, Sport Wales, Hockey Wales, Gloucester City Council, Gloucester Rugby, Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, Active Gloucestershire, Active Essex and Forest of Dean District Council. "I wanted students to leave Hartpury equipped not simply with a degree but with the experience, confidence, networks and professional identity to take their next step. I also wanted to make sure I took staff on the journey with me," he said. This initiative, he emphasised, is about giving valuable experience to students and staff, business value to clients, ongoing opportunities for research and knowledge exchange, and real-world impact and beneficial change. In the last four years, the Hartpury Business Hub has generated more than £300,000 in income, has run 45 consultancy projects and has resulted in 15 RKE agreements. In 2023 the initiative won a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence. "At the centre will always come the student experience," he stressed. "It will never deviate from that. That's why we got into education in the first place."

AND FINALLY…

Reflecting on the week's packed programme of events, QAA's Head of UK & International Membership Delivery said: "What another fantastic week it's been, with our colleagues from QAA member institutions sharing brilliant innovations and insights! Huge thanks to everyone who participated. We look forward to seeing you all again at our events throughout the year."