Does the Method of Assessment Affect Student Grades

Assessment is probably the most important and critical element in any system and in particular teaching and learning. This issue is even more pressing in engineering education due to its multi-faceted approach. Students certainly react differently to different methods of assessment, so do the assessors and accreditors. It is normally accepted that certain methods improve student learning more than others. The grades of the students, on the other hand, do not appear to be correlated to the method of assessment. In other words, the grades of the students do not reflect their overall skills. A pilot study on the grades of students carried out by the authors and its findings are presented in this paper.