Sustainable Assessment in Engineering Education – critical features of the examination process

Abstract

Examination in Higher Education involves university culture, formal rules, teachers’ knowledge and students’ learning efforts. This project researches the interplay between the formal examination system and the development of students’ and teachers’ work in the actual examination process, relating also to changes induced by the Bologna process. The conceptual frame-work combines strands of social practice theory. Formal aspects of assessments are viewed as classification systems working as boundary objects in relation to educational communities of practice. The examination system shows a detailed assessment structure with specified pedagogical intentions for the examination process both in pace and progress, which most students do not follow. Intended relations between assessments are gradually distorted and shape new conditions for student learning in the actual examination process that hereto is quite unknown.