6. Reporting

After analyzing your exam, it’s time to report the results to your students. This is an important moment for students, because grades can have far-reaching consequences, and not just for passing or failing. Grades can impact students’ BSA, the possibility to graduate cum laude, or the chances of securing a position on a Master’s programme or getting a job or an internship after graduation. As such, the University stipulates that students must receive ‘adequate feedback’ on assessment. Requirements for this differ per faculty or degree programme. For instance, the Education Desk is tasked with the publication of official final grades through SIS, but the amount of time available for grading is decided in your programme’s Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER).  

The Education Desk is tasked with publishing grades via SIS: only then are they official. In practice, instructors often send the grades to SIS themselves, through Final Grades in Canvas. You can let students know their grades before this, using the Grades function in Canvas, but they are unofficial at this point, and no rights can be derived from them. Grades become official after the opportunity to view the exam/assignment has passed and the deadline for students to appeal has passed. Your programme’s Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER) stipulate when grades must be entered in SIS. This means your grading time is limited, and usually lies somewhere between 15 and 20 working days.  

Grade validity

In principle, final grades stay valid for the amount of time it may reasonably take students to complete their degree, but this validity can be limited – for instance, if knowledge or skills are demonstrably out-of-date. Such restrictions can be found in your programme’s Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER). In some courses, the final grade is based on several smaller assessments whose grades are not recorded in SIS, but in Canvas. These partial grades are no longer valid if a student fails the course (i.e. if they redo the course in the next academic year, they start from scratch). It’s good to inform students of this beforehand. 

Students have the right to view their exam/assignment as well as the answer key or assessment form/rubric. However, you are usually free to decide how you want to facilitate this (check your programme or faculty’s guidelines to be sure). You can publish the correct answers online so students can access them anywhere, at any time, but you can also allow students to view them, alongside their own answers, for a limited period of time (online or in person). Another option is to organize a group review session for all students, in which you discuss common errors, for instance.  

A grade in itself is a kind of feedback, as it expresses the degree to which students have mastered the material. However, midterm exams and assignments offer the opportunity to provide students more detailed insight into their progress. You can give individual feedback or organize a review session where students can ask questions. One disadvantage of feedback is that it is primarily the instructor who’s hard at work (for instance, by providing many comments). Good feedback, however, puts the student to work. 

Detailed individual feedback on a final exam or assignment is usually not very effective. The course has ended, and students no longer have the opportunity to make changes, as they could after a midterm exam or assignment. If you do want to provide feedback on a final exam or assignment, a group review session could help. The University’s Teaching and Learning Centre offers an e-learning module on feedback.  

Each course must have one resit per academic year. Just like the original assessment, the resit assesses the course learning outcomes, but it can be in a different format. If the original assessment consists of a midterm assignment and a final exam, for instance, the resit may consist of just one exam. Of course, students must be informed of this beforehand, and rules on this may differ per programme or faculty, so check what applies in your situation. It differs per programme whether students who failed the course are automatically registered for the resit or whether they must register themselves. 

Conditional access

Some programmes or faculties allow you to include a ‘barrier’ that restricts access to the resit, for instance by requiring students to score an average of 4.0 before the resit. This prevents students from skipping the first chance and betting on passing the resit. Of course, students must be clearly informed of these rules beforehand, and it’s useful to consider what you will do with students who don’t meet these entry requirements due to bad luck or personal circumstances, as this can mean a lot of extra work for you.

Resitting a passing grade

Resits are primarily meant for students who missed the first chance due to bad luck or circumstances beyond their control. They are not meant for students to try and score a higher grade. Your programme’s Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER) stipulate whether students can resit passing grades. If so, the last grade always counts.  

Additional resits

Additional resit opportunities are only possible in exceptional circumstances, partly because they can lead to procrastination. That’s why it’s good to stimulate students to take part in the regular course assessment, for instance with a bonus that they lose if they take part in the resit, or with partial grades that compensate in the calculation of the final grade and which can’t be retaken in the resit.