University skills: Doing your first geography assessment

Lecturers and professors: Feel free to use this text in your course syllabus. Please credit Kelly Dombroski, 2023.

Beginning your first assessment in university human geography can be daunting. But here is a step-by-step guide to getting started.

Assessments can be formative or summative. A formative assessment seeks to help you learn through the doing of the assessment – for example, through a multimedia project, an essay, a report, a problem-based learning activity, an annotated bibliography, through group work. A summative assessment seeks to see how well you have understood and learned the material in the course and might look more like an exam, a quiz, or a reflection. Both kinds of assessment are important. In what follows we focus on formative assessments.

Step one: put it in your calendar

When you first get given your course information, you are usually given the deadlines for your assessments. Make sure you put these in your calendar – whether on your phone, on your noticeboard, or somewhere else were you will be reminded it is coming up. Look at the due date, and any time estimates given for the work. Start planning backwards from the due date to when you need to start. It’s likely to be much earlier than you think, especially if group work is involved.

Step two: read and understand what is required

Read the instructions for the assessment and go through any accompanying material. If this part can be stressful for you, do it in class, or with a friend so you can discuss and ask questions from someone else. If a marking rubric is provided, read that too. Ask questions in class, or post on a forum in your class learning management system. Some lecturers might be OK with you emailing them questions, many others prefer it in forums or in person/in class. They have told you somewhere how to contact them with questions. Unlike school teachers, lecturers might have many hundreds of students and will not necessarily know you well at this point, so make sure to check what they have already given you before emailing.

Step three: break it down

Try and break down the assessment into smaller chunks of work in a list. An essay question might need to be broken down into constituent parts. A project might need to be broken down into a set of tasks. For example, if you need to do some reading, write down on your list:

– research and create a reading list from a) the class material provided and b) from my own research.

If you need to decide on a topic or format, write that step down on your list too. Once you have a sense of what the final output will look like, write the parts down on your list:

– research introduction norms in human geography

– outline introduction

– draft introduction

– edit introduction for clarity and accuracy

Other things will come up too – for example:

– work out how to use the library.

Step four: put the plan in your calendar

Once you have a bit of a plan, assign some days to the different tasks. This will help you stay on track and ensure you don’t end up in a last minute panic with different assessments from different courses all due together. Do make sure you put in time for your other studies, the class room work of your course, your social life, wellbeing activities and other responsibilities into your plan as well!

Step five: just do it – and revise it

No plan is perfect, but a plan is better than no plan. As you try and stick to your plan, you might notice it isn’t working how you thought it would. Try and consciously revise it considering what you have learned. You will get better and better at planning assessments as you go through university. You will also likely need to edit and revise your work. Getting feedback from a friend can be helpful too, as sometimes we have not communicated our ideas clearly. Your university may also have reader services (often in the library) for helping you here.

Step six: submission

Make sure you leave plenty of time for submission. If it is online, things may go wrong with file format, internet, or plagiarism detection software. Make sure you name your file well too so that you or the marker can find it again. If it is hard copy submission, you might get lost, not be able to find a printer, or the box may be in a part of the university that is closed when you try to submit.

Step seven: read the feedback

For formative assessments, you will get feedback on your work. It is important you read this as it helps you do better the next time around. In human geography, feedback is part of ‘closing the loop’ in the learning cycle and is key to getting the material and the skills of doing geography embedded.