A proposal for continuous assessment at low cost

Continuous assessment in higher education can have among its goals: (1) help students to organize their study throughout the course; (2) provide useful feedback to the students; (3) provide teachers with information on the students´ progress and needs; and (4) have a final mark which does not depend uniquely on the result of a final examination. However, implementing continuous assessment usually results in additional effort for both the teacher and the student. As a consequence, there can be a lack of motivation for the teacher to implement this method and for the student to follow it. We present the methodology that we use in a course on operating systems at the Barcelona School of Informatics. We describe how the different parts of the methodology work to achieve the goals stated. We also evaluate the cost of applying our methodology, both for teachers and students, compared with other assessment methodologies. We have gathered data from different sources through five terms (students grades, students opinions, information about other courses) to evaluate our proposal. This evaluation backs our claim that our methodology achieves all the proposed goals.