Campus Talks: How to create university assessments that serve learning

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What purpose does, or should, assessment serve? How can educators shift the focus of assessment towards feedback? Who is really driving higher education’s unhelpful obsession with grades? And how does GenAI affect all this?

In this episode of Campus Talks, we explore all these questions and more with David Boud, Deakin distinguished professor at Deakin University and a leading scholar on assessment and feedback. David is foundation director of Deakin’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning and emeritus professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

He has been a pioneer in learning-centred approaches to assessment and is one of the most highly cited academics in the world on teaching, learning and assessment in higher and professional education with dozens of books bearing his name, including The Impact of Feedback in Higher Education (2019) and Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education (2022).

We discuss what constitutes good feedback, strategies for engaging students in the feedback process, how to design assessments that centre feedback and learning and where universities have been going wrong on assessment and grading.

For more advice on these topics from educators all over the world, head to our spotlight guide on reframing assessment as part of learning.

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Further reading on the topics discussed in this podcast:

The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education, Studies in Higher Education, by Naomi E. Winstone & David Boud (2022).

Developing a learning-centred framework for feedback literacy, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Elizabeth Molloy, David Boud & Michael Henderson (2020).

Measuring what learners do in feedback: the feedback literacy behaviour scale, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Phillip Dawson, Zi Yan, Anastasiya Lipnevich, Joanna Tai, David Boud & Paige Mahoney (2024).

What feedback literate teachers do: an empirically derived competency framework, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, David Boud and Phillip Dawson (2023). 

The wicked problem of AI and assessment, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Thomas Corbin, Margaret Bearman, David Boud & Phillip Dawson (2025).

Developing evaluative judgement for a time of generative artificial intelligence, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Margaret Bearman, Joanna Tai, Phillip Dawson, David Boud & Rola Ajjawi (2024).