An Investigation Into The Assessment Of Humanity Students’Academic Achievements In China’s Local Universities

The popularization of China’s higher education gives rise to an instant question as towhether the student development modes in higher education institutions have transformedthemselves from the previous elite education modes to meet the new challenges, whichboth higher education researchers and executives of higher education institutions have totake into serious consideration. In an effort to shed light on the actual situation ofeducation modes in China’s current universities and colleges, this paper chooses a localfunded university (Henceforth University A, UA) as a sample by focusing on theUniversity’s practices in undergraduate students’ academic achievement assessment, forthe simple reason that academic assessment policies and practices of a university reflectvery well its philosophy of education, objectives of student development and quality ofstudent development. The research approaches adopted in our study include documentationretrieval, questionnaire analyses and contrastive analyses, which are combined to exploreup the reforms that local funded universities to meet the challenges posed by thepopularization of higher education. It is argued that assessment is a key issue in all levelsof education performing the washback function on education practices (also termed thebaton of examination in China) and thus this paper’s study can be of both theoretical andpractical value to higher education researchers and practitioners.The term local funded universities in this paper refer to all the universities funded orinvested by local governments in China and they actually take up the chief part of China’shigher education. Our Sample University (UA) is a211-Project key university funded byJiangsu Province, which locates its own development as a teaching and education instituteand is thus highly representative of China’s local universities. In addition, the students ofhumanities in UA refer to students from a variety of programs in majors like philosophy,economics, law, education, literature, history and management etc. Questionnaire and contrastive analyses indicate that UA adopts similar approaches asother universities in China to assessment management, which is basically a double leveledmanagement mode, with the Office of Teaching Affairs responsible for generalmanagement and schools or departments responsible for assessment practices. UA hasissued a rich variety of assessment management regulations and documents, dealing withall the procedures of assessment, but no document is issued to guide the assessment ofacademic achievements of humanity students. The most marked feature of UA assessmentsystem is that it issued documents to promote the development of testing corpus and testpaper corpus, which no other local universities are found to enforce. Furthermore, wedevise a questionnaire to find out students’ comments on the current assessment situationsin UA.400questionnaires are given out randomly to students of10humanities programs,with288effective questionnaires collected. The documentation retrieval from the Office ofTeaching Affairs and questionnaire analyses indicate that:(1)UA’s assessment policy is theone most commonly adopted in universities throughout China; the score marking astudent’s academic achievement consists of “routine performance+phase test performance+term test performance”;(2) UA’s test (test paper) corpus development policy is notsuccessfully implemented; no test corpus is finished, with only some test paper corpusdeveloped, which have not even covered all kernel courses;(3)the test paper corpus is onlyused for term exams; the teachers display flexibility and creativity in routine or phase tests,which can help to cultivate student’s ability to apply knowledge comprehensively topractical issues as well as their creativity; this fact shows the contradiction between UAmanagement regulations and teachers’ practices;(4) UA shows special concern for themonitoring of term exams; a great number of assessment regulations are devised andissued to guide the testing of different courses in the university’s effort to make itsassessment system scientific.After studying UA’s assessment policies and regulations from the perspective ofmodern education and testing theories, we find out the following aspects of drawbacks thatmay be common to all local universities:(1) No assessment policy or regulation is found toguide the assessment of humanity students, which indicates that university executives showno concern at all for the fundament differences between humanity programs and scienceand technology programs;(2) universities show little concern for teacher training, whichbecome all the more serious a problem after teachers majoring pedagogy of different programs are transferred to the school of education; an immediate result is that manyteachers do not conform to education laws but handle the assessment issue randomly oraccording to their intuition;(3) universities generally adopt a misleading attitude towardtests; the function of a test as a way of scoring students’ academic achievement is largelyaccepted, but its educational function is discarded, which is the source of our failure toprovide a full assessment of students’ performances in universities and thus our failure tocultivate students’ aptitude;(4) the contents that often appear in test papers of humanitycourses are mostly isolate knowledge points that require students’ rote memory rather thanproblems that call for students’ comprehensive ability to apply knowledge, let alone theircreative ability;(5) the way and structure of testing are apparently flawed in that the wayof testing is monotonous and the structure of testing not integrated;(6) testing items arelargely empty talks, with little concern for heated local topics.On the basis of the above investigations and study, we propose three cardinalprinciples and some specific ways of improving local universities’ system of studentassessment. It is argued that renovation of the current assessment systems in localuniversities should abide by the student oriented, developmental and local featuringprinciples. The specific reform proposals include renovation of testing contents,establishment of test quality analyses and assessment feedback mechanism, thedevelopment of academic assessment modes that conform to the features of humanitystudents and their academic achievements.