Changing representations of student achievement: the need for innovation

Transcripts and testamurs serve to confirm the award of a degree but offer limited information on what a student can actually do. This conceptual paper considers the problem of how graduate achievements are represented by universities in typically reductive and limited ways that do not enable student achievements and distinctiveness to be communicated to future employers, communities and students themselves. It argues that refinements to existing methods for the design and development of assessment are needed to encompass both university validated and contextualised credentials along with student-constructed portrayals of achievement and personas. Significant change is needed to assessment design, data capture and storage and the ways in which learning outcomes are tracked across a program and over time. Innovations in assessment representation should strengthen employer trust in the value of degrees, student trust in assessment processes and scaffold student agency in curating their employability narratives.

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