Ensure accurate, meaningful assessment and grading

Student-centred learning and authentic course assessment are taking centre stage in today’s education landscape, with a greater emphasis on applied skills and competencies. Combined with the dual risks and opportunities presented by technologies such AI and their implications on proof of learning, it’s clear that instructors need deeper insights and tools to help evaluate student work. With DEI also top of mind, educators need ways to deliver immediate, effective feedback tailored to individual students and scaled across class sizes, to ensure student engagement and retention.

Summative assessments are typically “high-stakes” and used to measure student achievement at specific points in time to determine overall mastery of content. Formative assessments, on the other hand, are designed to monitor progress along the way and provide immediate feedback that informs instruction and learning and encourages students to course-correct after setbacks. More frequent formative assessment presents an opportunity to scaffold student growth, and specialized grading software can support this strategy.

Without academic integrity underpinning assessment, it risks losing its value as true measures of student learning. This risks unfair advantages and erosion of trust in the credential an institution confers. Especially at a time when generative AI use is blurring students’ own output, it is imperative that educators have confidence in the authenticity of student work. Building a culture of academic integrity and embedding integrity measures into assessment practices can ensure assessments remain reflective of each student's genuine capabilities.

Evolving expectations in assessment and the pressure to do more in less time are outpacing manual grading methods. Educators are seeking assistance to reduce workloads and gain time back to teach. For instance, reusable comments and AI-assisted answer grouping in grading software can scale and increase consistency, while blind or anonymous grading can reduce grading bias. Technology is never a substitute for educator intuition, but the two can work hand in hand to elevate the provision of timely, personalized grading and feedback.

By harnessing assessment data of student performance, educators can ascertain mastery or pinpoint gaps that need attention among individuals or cohorts. This data must be accessible and actionable in order to yield targeted interventions, personalised support, and adjustments to teaching approaches or curriculums. Turnitin’s detailed analytics and item-level statistics help instructors get a clear picture of student performance and address potential roadblocks in real-time, along with aggregate data for department-level metrics and to inform decision-making.

Turnitin’s assessment suite provides a flexible, unmatched array of tools and integrations that are time-tested and incorporate evolving educator and student needs. Over 16,000 institutions globally entrust Turnitin to support a variety of assignment and assessment types, typically yielding a 50% reduction in grading time. We invest in AI functionality to accelerate grading at scale and enable instructors to engage more with students, with research demonstrating that Turnitin’s grading software supports ‘where to next?’ feedback that leads to enhanced student performance over time.

Despite the advantages of digital methods, paper-based assessment continues to play a key role in many courses, offering unique benefits around familiarity, accessibility, and perceived reliability. However, it is often accompanied by significant logistical and administrative challenges. By harnessing Turnitin features such as automatic roster matching and optical character recognition (OCR), educators can bridge the gap between traditional and digital assessment methods to create a more robust, efficient, and equitable assessment and grading process.

Turnitin prioritizes the security of your academic data by implementing robust protective measures. Data is stored in highly secure regional data centers, ensuring compliance with local data privacy regulations, and additional security features safeguard your information throughout the process. With stringent privacy and protection policies, Turnitin ensures that academic data is handled with the utmost care, providing administrators, instructors, and students with the confidence that their work is secure and safe from risk.