A couple of days ago I overheard a student asking another staff member if they could see an example of some work done by the previous year’s students, to help them with a current assignment.
I think most lecturers get asked that fairly frequently, and I’m not quite sure what the best response is. On the face of it, giving an example of good work to a student should help them produce good work themselves – e.g. by understanding what it is about that example that makes it good. Certainly, when I’ve done things like write a bid for the NZ Marsden Fund (for which, I should declare, I’ve never got beyond the first round – except as a low percentage associate investigator) I’ve tracked down as many successful bids as I can and tried to see what about them leaps out as attractive. (Obviously I’ve failed to spot the required things so far). And when writing an article for a journal I haven’t submitted to before, I have a look at that journal and see what kind of thing they seem to publish. That’s just common sense.
But there’s a drawback to providing example assignments to students. One is obviously that, in a few students, it tempts plagiarism, which is a serious matter. But it also discourages novel approaches. All you end up with is a set of assignments that look the same as the previous year’s (or, worse still, years’). It also suggests that a student is unable to work out what you want to see in the assignment from the instructions you’ve given them – i.e. your instructions are not clear enough. Confused students are not a good sign.
I’ve begun to look more carefully at the ‘learning outcomes’ for the papers I teach here at Waikato. The learning outcomes are how we would spot a student who has successfully taken the paper (not a list of topics they were exposed to in lectures) and these should drive the assessments. As we all know, it is the assessments that actually drive what a student will learn. Get the assessments right, with clear, transparent instructions, and learning should happen. Does giving an example of a completed assignment from a previous year really assist in doing this? – or is it a distraction for the student as he or she works through his or her own assignment? I’m still not sure.
Interesting. Perhaps the solution is not to show some other student’s assignment but a collage of good and bad ‘paragraphs’ from a number of prior work (but perhaps even on a different topic to minimise the possibility of plagiarism, or modified by you so it would not be useful to plagiarise). You could then comment on what is good about it or what is bad about each of them based on the assessment objectives. Yes I know, time… But it could be built over time I guess….