Assessment Strategies for Large Online Classes 

Determining Assessment Purpose

The idea of assessing for large classes, whether in person or online, can be daunting. Yet designing and subsequently grading assessments that are effective and equitable, and allow your students to demonstrate their skills and knowledge in multiple ways (i.e. a principle of Universal Design for Learning), are critical aspects of effective teaching. There are several ways you can reduce the burden of extensive grading while still giving your students plenty of useful feedback on their work and progress in your course.

Remember: it’s important that you, the instructor, are clear on your purpose for assessment: i.e. Why are you asking students to do an assignment? How does it fit in with the learning objectives for the class and course? You might be assessing for one of the following reasons: 

• to check for student understanding of a given topic
• to engage and motivate students in learning
• to collect data on student learning in order to adapt teaching
• to provide students with feedback on their progress and learning
• to evaluate a student’s performance or mastery of skills/knowledge in a course

Answering these questions is especially important in large class sizes, where you’ll want to ensure that each assessment is intentional, so that you are not unnecessarily over-burdening yourself with grading.

Developing a Holistic Assessment Plan 

Choosing the right assessment approach depends on your aims and what would best convey students’ mastery of skills and knowledge developed throughout the course. Taking the time before your course begins to thoughtfully map out your plan for assessment will help ensure that individual assessments fall into your overall strategy for the course and contribute to meeting learning aims. The assessments you choose should allow students to demonstrate their mastery of the objectives.

Remember, assessment is an ongoing process: it happens before (diagnostic), during (formative), and after (summative) the learning. Completing the online course design planning document and writing down all the major (high-stakes) and minor (low-stakes) assessments in the course can help you ensure that there is a variety of assessment types and options for learners.

Whether it’s diagnostic, formative or summative, keep in mind some best practices in assessment: 

• Connect the activity to the learning objectives
• Provide clear instructions for the activity
• Give diverse examples of good work
• Give students flexibility for demonstrations of mastery (follow principles of UDL)
• Make all materials accessible
• Give timely, constructive feedback
• Plan to assess your assessment

Strategies for Formative (informal, low-stakes) Assessment

The purpose of formative assessment is to monitor learning, give students feedback about their work while it is in progress and help students correct errors or missteps. These are lower-stakes assessments that are given periodically throughout the course, and they can be graded or not, which is especially important to keep in mind in large class sizes (Theal & Franklin, 2010; Trumbull & Lash, 2013). You can gather important feedback from your students, as well as provide them with information on their progress using the following strategies and tools.

Polling/Surveys

You can use Zoom polls (during synchronous sessions) or Google surveys (for asynchronous work) to informally and/or anonymously gather information on students’ understanding of a particular topic, where they might be confused/have questions, or aspects of the course that are/are not working for students. These tools allow you to gather information from many students quickly.

Discussion forums

Blackboard Discussion Boards or Moodle Forums are commonly used for a variety of reasons, including engagement and assessment (see our page Facilitating Discussion Board Activities for ideas). When you use these tools for assessment purposes in large classes, a few strategies are recommended:

• Split the large class into groups of 15-20 students, so that smaller groups are discussing the same topic. You can give everyone the same prompt, but have 5 simultaneous discussions going.
• Create a simple rubric/grading system to grade posts, and share that with students
• Clearly outline your expectations for student participation (e.g. “everyone must write one original post and one response post”), which will save you time on email.
• Give one cumulative, summarizing response toward the end of the discussion (i.e. don’t reply to every post), and let students know that’s how you will be participation. Set the expectation that they are responding to each other, not you.

Multiple choice quizzes

• Grading multiple choice quizzes is easy (which is why they’re loved, especially in large classes!), but they are hard to write (even if you have a publisher’s questions) and they’re prone to cheating. Carefully crafted multiple choice quizzes can be useful forms of formative assessments.
• To find out more, and to review strategies for reducing cheating, visit Tips for Creating Multiple Choice Exams.

Student-created assessments/instructional materials

An alternative to having students take multiple choice assessments or quizzes created by you, is to have the students write questions and answers based on the content. In large classes, for example, students can work in groups to create:

• 5 multiple choice questions. You can grade the quality of those and/or select 1-2 (perhaps with some modification) from each group to put on a quiz.
• a study guide for an exam as a form of a formative assessment. You’ll be able to understand if they understand the key concepts.

Requiring them to work collaboratively on these assessments also reduces the tendency to cheat because they’re already being told to work with someone else. 

Strategies for Summative (formal, high-stakes) Assessment

Quiz/test creation

Multiple-choice, and other closed response exams (e.g. true/false, matching, binary (a/b), are commonly utilized in online teaching, as they are easy to grade and appear to be more ‘objective.’ However, they are not easy to create. It is challenging to create multiple choice exams that are clearly worded (in question and answer), appropriately challenging, reliable measures of student achievement, fair and equitable.

See our page on Tips for Multiple Choice Exams to read about how to write questions and mitigate cheating.

Collaborative projects

While group work can have its drawbacks, it also has its positives, for students and for instructors—including reduced grading time. Collaborative projects can be creative, innovative, and even fun for students. Here are some tips for creating a more effective collaborative experience:

• Split students into groups of about 3-4, max
• Design projects that can’t be completed by just one person (e.g. students must create a video in which all students have a part)
• Give variety in topic, subject and/or final product
• Assign or allow students to assign group roles (e.g. team leader, recorder, project manager)
• Have students record their projects, to save time on presenting in class
  • They can also post them on a discussion board, and make comments on each other’s work
• Use a rubric to communicate project expectations

Manageable “Essays”

Essays and research papers are commonly used summative assessments, but they can be cumbersome to grade. Depending on your pedagogical aims and learning objectives, perhaps students can gather their main ideas and supporting evidence into one of the following:

• Extended outlines
• Annotated bibliographies
• Templates/worksheets

Grading/Providing Feedback

Providing students with feedback—written, verbal, video, etc. comments and guidance about their work and progress in the course—is a critical aspect of the learning process (Nicol et al., 2014). Our guide on providing feedback in online courses has in-depth support on this topic. Yet for large online classes, here are a few quick suggestions:

• Only ‘review’ and grade assignments the most important assignments
  • Do not grade other assignments, or mark as complete/incomplete
• Make use of self & peer review
• Use rubrics, either built in to the LMS or as attachment
• Create a set of stock language for some of your common feedback and build it in to the LMS to choose from while grading
• Use voice feedback/screencasting to communicate your thoughts
• Provide weekly summaries, what the whole class did well/needs to work on

Grading/Providing Feedback

Providing students with feedback—written, verbal, video, etc. comments and guidance about their work and progress in the course—is a critical aspect of the learning process (Nicol et al., 2014). Our guide on providing feedback in online courses has in-depth support on this topic. Yet for large online classes, here are a few quick suggestions:

• Only ‘review’ and grade assignments the most important assignments
  • Do not grade other assignments, or mark as complete/incomplete
• Make use of self & peer review
• Use rubrics, either built in to the LMS or as attachment
• Create a set of stock language for some of your common feedback and build it in to the LMS to choose from while grading
• Use voice feedback/screencasting to communicate your thoughts
• Provide weekly summaries, what the whole class did well/needs to work on

Mitigating Cheating

Cheating is a particular concern for online courses. The best way to avoid cheating in online assessments is through the combination of: a series of formative assessments; higher-order thinking summative assessments; a variety of assessment types; required or encouraged collaborative work; and the opportunity for students to demonstrate their mastery of course concepts and skills in multiple ways. Here are some other tips that can help with this issue:

• Use Turnitin, which helps instructors evaluate the originality of students’ work by comparing electronic documents to online sources and the Turnitin database.
  • Turnitin for Canvas
  • AI writing detection tool in Turnitin - Please note that this is a brand new detection technology, and similar tools have shown a significant false positive rate. Because of this, use this rating as an alert to look at the assignment more closely, not as definite proof of AI use. 
• Refrain from using publisher test banks verbatim. 
  • It is convenient, but students may be able to get access to these
  • Instead, think about using the questions as inspiration for writing your own questions (Smith Budhai 2020)
• Use randomized questions
  • Rather than having an identical set of assessment tasks provided to all of the students, it is advisable to have a range of assessments (aka a pool of the assessment tasks)
• Require choice explanation
  • Design the multiple-choice exam so that there is a space for students to explain how they chose all/some of their answers
  • You only have to review if you suspect cheating
  • It could give you more insight into where and why confusion among students exists
• Delay score availability. 
  • Do not make the score available for immediate view after test completion
  • This way, students who finish early cannot see their score and then advise students who have not completed the test yet (Smith Budhai 2020)

References & Resources

Bruff, D. (2009-2010) Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning Using Clickers. Essays on Teaching Excellence Toward the Best in the Academy, 21(3). A publication of The Professional & Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (www.podnetwork.org).

Nicol, D., Thomson, A., & Breslin, C. (2014). Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(1), 102-122

Smith Budhai, S. (2020, May 11). Fourteen Simple Strategies to Reduce Cheating on Online Examinations. Faculty Focus.

Theall, M. and Franklin J.L. (2010). Assessing Teaching Practices and Effectiveness for Formative Purposes. In: A Guide to Faculty Development. KJ Gillespie and DL Robertson (Eds). Jossey Bass: San Francisco, CA.

Trumbull, E., & Lash, A. (2013). Understanding formative assessment: Insights from learning theory and measurement theory. San Francisco: WestEd.