Assessment Plan

How do I create an overall assessment plan for my course?

Map out your assessments across the course

Mapping out your assessments across a term allows you to visualize the distribution of student engagement with the material and your grading efforts and responsibilities. It also allows you to plan formative assessments that provide feedback to students about their preparedness for upcoming summative assessments. This can be done by mapping assessments to a calendar of the term.

Example assessment plan

This example is a map of major assessments to a semester calendar for a generic course.

Notice in this course the major assessments consist of 5 quizzes, 3 exams, and a final project. Do a check to make sure most of your assessment points for your course assess your most critical/important learning aims.
Next, add your formative assessments to this assessment schedule.
Add and map formative assessments designed to support summative assessments.

Two types of formative assessments were added in the example.

The first was a diagnostic survey given at the beginning of the term designed to assess the background knowledge and skills students will need for the course. Performance on the survey will provide the instructor a sense of the overall strengths and weaknesses of students to aid planning and will allow students to address areas of weakness.

The second set of formative assessments are designed to break the larger project into parts keeping students on track throughout the semester and preventing them from putting all their effort into the project in the week before the final exam. Note that formative assessments are worth a small number of points to motivate students to complete them.

You more than likely will have to make adjustments as you go when putting together your overall assessment plan, accommodating things such as the University calendar, your travel and upcoming commitments, assessment schedules for other courses, and avoiding grading bottlenecks (periods of concentrated grading). Once the term begins, avoid making changes to your assessments.

Example: Creating an assessment plan for a History course
Resource document: Template - Mapping Course Level Aims, Activities, and Assessments

Communicate assessment points to students

Communicate to students the distribution of total assessment points at the beginning of the term.
Students should know at the beginning of the semester the distribution of points that sum to the final grade of the course as required by the UMN Regent’s syllabus policy and UMD Syllabus policy. It allows them to plan their studying for your course within the context of their other courses and personal, family, and work obligations.

For the generic course example, it may look like this:
Calculate point distribution for the course

This is also an opportunity to determine if the total distribution of points reflects how you would like students to budget their efforts.

For example:
Students may put more relative effort into a project worth 40% of a grade rather than 10% of a grade.

If a course includes only 2 midterms and a final – students may wait to invest multiple hours of study a week or so before the exam.

If a course includes 10 quizzes – students may distribute their study efforts over the term. Note that when using multiple assessments in a term students may need some guidance in preparation efforts so that they do not become overwhelmed. 

Canvas also has a “What-If” grade projection tool students can use to calculate future grades. Keeping grades up-to-date will help students manage their workload for your course and will minimize grade surprises and revision requests at the end of the semester.