Designed for all assessments

This guide is designed fulfil the aspirations of the ‘Designed for all’ pillar of our Assessment and Feedback Strategy. It offers practical advice to unit and programme directors about creating an inclusive assessment environment for all our students, and suggests how to identify solutions for individual students who may need further mitigations or support. This guide is intended to complement the BILT Guide: Inclusive teaching, learning and assessment – How to design for all, and it links to the University’s Policy on reasonable adjustments for teaching, learning and assessment.

Why design assessments for all?

Designing for all emphasises preparations in the design phase rather than adjusting for individuals at the time of an assessment which can be time-consuming and stigmatise individual students
The best way to ‘design for all’ is to balance choice and variety across the programme, as stressed in integrated pillar of the Assessment and Feedback strategy, and to incorporate formative assessment and feedback to support all students’ learning.

What does ‘designing for all’ look like?

Providing alternative methods of assessment that students can choose, and which demonstrate that they have met the Intended Learning Outcomes
Incorporating plenty of formative assessment with feedback which links to the summative so that students practice tasks and learn from feedback
Offering different varieties of assessment across the programme so that students can play to their strengths.
Dialling down the volume of summative assessment – both frequency and size, and limiting clashes with assessment on concurrent units, so far as is possible
Enabling students to bring their diverse talents and experiences to assessments to demonstrate their learning in different ways
Focusing on feedback which helps students to identify gaps in their performance, and ways to improve.

Additional Resources

Ideas and toolkits

Access the alternative assessments toolkits.

Access the ideas and toolkit here.