Assessment is important! But we shouldn’t confuse assessment with the activities we ask students to do as a matter of practice, to build their skills and their knowledge base. For a whole range of reasons, mostly recently the arrival of chatbots, we think it is important to approach assessment as distinct from practice, and to shield students’ learning activities from assessment pressures as much as possible. This means building ungraded opportunities to develop and practice core skills, both through our use of classroom time and in the way we structure assignments and allocate grades. We think there is a significant place for ungraded and pass/fail assignments even within the strictures of a conventional grading environment — not as an alternative to the accountability of evaluation, but as a more rigorous and responsible way to support and assess students’ learning.
Here are some blog posts about structuring assessment across a syllabus.