another newbie question: validity of assessment of student learning?

Beowulf · science forum beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

My college needs to document student learning ("assessment"), and have
chosen to use software called eLumen. I am concerned about the validity of
this, statistically or otherwise, because basically teachers evaluate
their student learning on scales of 1-5 and then for all or partial
classlists teachers assign the 1-5 scores for their students into the
eLuman classlists, for various class items (term paper, success on a class
activity, exam, etc).

It seems to me that this is highly subject to bias. First, the teachers
are doing their own evaluation of their students' learning-- wouldn't such
teachers tend to want to subjectively give higher scores, since
administrators will see how students in the teachers' department are doing
("learning"), and fear reprisal if students are not learning? How can the
assessment be unbiased? The teacher can even pick and choose what
activities to score-- picking those that students do best in, including
any test scores which I would think would stand the best chance of having
the least bias.

Then there is the whole issue of the teachers designing and using their
rubrics (tables or checklists of criteria to give a score of 1-5)-- that
seems quite subjective, and then more subjectivity in a teacher choosing
if a student has scored a 3 or a 4, etc.

How valid is this method of assessing learning?

Google