Toeing the line: Mapping graduate attributes on to speaking and writing assessment in the humanities and social sciences

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Author: Ana Maria Ducasse

Spanish Program, Historical and European Studies

The improvement of assessment practices in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science was stimulated by domain experts reflecting on their practice which results in action across the faculty. Academics verbalized connections between assessment and the attainment of graduate attributes to flesh out what Graduate Attributes (GAs) meant to their different programs, whether they taught them and how they were assessed. The major finding was that academics are willing to express how different their disciplines are from others and this is a way into discussing alignment with assessment and Graduate Attributes.

The first practical outcome is eliciting a description of what the 10 GA’s from the faculty mean to an academic discipline. Another outcome is the alignment of that description of GAs onto current assessment which identifies gaps and starts the conversation on changes needed to incorporate GA’s in the program unit guide. The intended end result is improved Course Exit Questionnaires as a result of this process, whereby domain experts make explicit the alignment of GAs with their course assessment in comprehensive unit guides for students.