Changing assessment for good: building on the emergency switch to promote future-oriented assessment and feedback designs

During the pandemic, to manage the difficulties produced by the shutdown of campuses, many universities initially responded by cancelling significant numbers of formal exams, reducing the volume of summative assessment and finding, often at speed, alternative ways of ensuring that learning outcomes had been met. This paper suggests that universities now have a vital opportunity to make positive long-term changes to assessment as a result of the rapid alterations many made due to campus closures during the pandemic. We now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine assessment for good, rather than simply returning to the status quo. One way of supporting this change, we argue, is to reconceptualise assessment and feedback practices by adopting future-oriented design principles.