It is the time of year when there is a lot of course work to assess.

I have always been a strong believer in providing the marking criteria for students to follow. After all, I have to mark to the criteria so the students should be allowed to know what I will be looking for.

All year long I have been providing my GCSE and GCE groups with the marking criteria I will be using. I have given them frequent and regular reminders that they need to look at the criteria and ensure that their work fits what I will be looking for. I create presentations, provide handouts of ‘tips’ and give print outs of the marking criteria for the students to keep.

Even with constant reminders I am amazed how few students pay attention to those guidlines. Their work often resembles anything but what the marking criteria is asking for. Often the criteria is quite clear in that you have to include a certain section, part or comment to get above minimum marks and still many students fail to include that section.

Even worse, I am still seeing coursework copied from other students within the same class. One daft fool even handed in a piece of coursework which was a direct copy and paste from the examination board exemplar coursework.

It is easy to get good marks and as adults we can see that. However, many of our young adults have yet to discover the benefit of using assessment criteria to get good marks.

Proportions? About 15% follow the assessment criteria, 70% fail to meet the critera and 15% don’t seem to have even taken the effort to look at it.

Assessment for learning - good in theory but not the silver bullet that us adults see it as!