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What is a Course Assessment Plan?

A course assessment plan (CAP) is a document that summarizes how every learning outcome in your course will be formally evaluated.

Why Create a Course Assessment Plan?

Before we talk about how to make a course assessment plan (CAP), let’s go over why you should bother.

Exercise Control Over Students (And Your) Workload

If you make a CAP at the beginning of a course and stick to it, you know that your students’ workload, and your workload, won’t accidentally get away on you.

Focus on Industry Needs

If you start your course by planning assessments that represent what employers will want your students to know / do / believe, you can focus your lessons on what will be most helpful to students in the long run.

Vary Your Assessments

Without a CAP, it can be easy to get to the end of a year and realize that you have only a narrow range of assessments to tell you if your students have been successful. CAPs help you make sure you evaluate students using a variety of methods.

Choose The Right Tool for the Right Job

As we saw in Choosing an Assessment Tool, different outcomes lend themselves to different types of assessment. Some of those require more planning and teamwork than others. CAPs help you to mobilize resources, in time and on budget, to set better assessments.

Be Transparent

Students and industry alike want to know the basis of your evaluations. CAPs can help you demonstrate the reliability and validity of your evaluation strategy — and can help you improve it as your teaching practice evolves.

Respond to Grade Appeals

When students challenge the grade they have been given, this document is an essential piece of evidence to demonstrate that their grade was determined fairly.

Respond to Change

Evaluation needs change from time to time, and when that happens, CAPs help you to revise your plan quickly and transparently. Sask Polytech’s 2017 move from a 60% to 50% passing grade is easier for instructors who have created CAPs for their courses.

Ideally, instructors should create a course assessment plan for every course before they create any other course materials or resources.

How to Create a Course Assessment Plan

Start by downloading the Course Assessment Plan Template (if you are not a Sask Polytech employee, click here for a PDF version). Then, follow the instructions written below, or watch this step-by-step video.

1. Start by listing your learning outcomes.
2. Determine the domain and level of Bloom’s Taxonomy to which each outcome corresponds.
3. Determine the weighting of each learning outcome. You may need to do this in consultation with your supervisor or a colleague. Weightings may be relative to:
   • industry rating
   • % of instruction time
   • level of difficulty (e.g. as per Bloom’s level)
   • subjective level importance
4. Decide how each outcome is best evaluated. Note that every outcome must be evaluated, but that doesn’t mean that every outcome needs its own evaluation. For example, parts of LO1, LO3, and all of LO5 may be evaluated in a written exam, LO2 will be evaluated in a performance test, and parts of LO1 and LO3 and all of LO4 will be evaluated in a project.
5. Once you’ve roughed out your evaluation plan, review it to ensure that
   1. all of your LO’s are evaluated at least once
   2. the types of assessment you plan to use are “good fits” for the LOs they are meant to assess
   3. your industry would consider that there is an acceptable variety of assessment strategies used
   4. your industry would consider the assessment strategies to be a good predictor of student success as a worker in your industry
6. Finally, proceed with creating individual Assessment Blueprints. As you make your blueprints, you may find you need to come back and revise your CAP.
7. Once you have finalized your CAP and your blueprints, you are ready to start planning the learning activities (lessons) that you will use in your course to ensure that students are successful in your assessments.

Example

Click here for an example of a completed CAP for MKTG228. In addition to filling in information from the existing template, this instructor chose to use MS Excel to further demonstrate variance between time spent and weighting of each LO, and included some other information, and removed columns that were not relevant to this course.

Last modified 15-June-2017.