Roundtable: Assessing student learning: Using interdisciplinary synergies to develop good teaching and assessment practice

Sydney Masonic Centre

Tuesday September 4, 2007

Title: Graduate qualities, learning and assessment: a false dawn, adding value to the university degree or the re-branding of tertiary education?

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Author: Glenn Mitchell

History Program, University of Wollongong

This paper sets out to contribute to the growing debate on graduate qualities. It takes an innovative approach to this discussion; it begins with the graduate in the workforce and works backwards to interrogate the relationship between assessment, teaching, learning, and graduate qualities. How did the graduate get to the workplace? What did the employer see in her/his tertiary qualifications that led to employment? Through what means did the graduate acquire that which the employer found attractive? And what was ‘it’?

The University of Wollongong, like many Australian universities, began its development of graduate qualities through the development of generic skills. It then replaced these with graduate attributes and recently it refined the list of attributes to a smaller list of graduate qualities. Assessment of work is how students see and define their learning of and progress through a subject. Assessment is also how teachers understand how learning may have occurred in a subject. How though do assessment tasks link to students’ knowledge of and access to graduate qualities?

This paper uses the lens of an internship subject at the University of Wollongong, ARTS301, to investigate these questions.

Keywords: graduate qualities, graduate attributes, assessment tasks.