THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA AT WORK: LIGHTS AND SHADOWS DEFINING CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT

The directives of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have focused the attention on the students’ learning process. Very related to that concept is the assessment system, as it is the way to ascertain the knowledge, understanding, and skills attained by the students. Actually, testing has become a critical component of the education reform, and the Continuous Assessment (henceforth “CA”) has become one of the distinctive characteristics of the assessment system in the universities studies subject to the EHEA.
Since the year 2006, when the University of Barcelona (Spain) defined new regulations about the assessment system in order to adapt to the guidelines of the EHEA, the CA is considered the usual form to test the students in all the studies; especially, in those degrees that were pioneering experiences in implementing the guidelines of the EHEA, as for example: the Public Administration and Management diploma course.
The aim of this paper is to analyze how CA has been defined by the lectures who teach in the Public Administration and Management diploma course at the University of Barcelona (Spain). Since it is a Bologna pioneering experience, it is a good case of study to verify if one of the cornerstones of the EHEA has been accomplished with success.
In order to achieve our objective we analyze in depth the Teaching Plans of the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years. We find that there exists a high dispersion on how lecturers define the CA: some of them assess the participation and attendance to lessons while others do not. Moreover, in some subjects, there is a final exam as well as the submission of different activities during the term; whereas in other subjects there is not a final exam. To sum up, it seems that there is not a unified view of how to perform CA, and this diversity of views persists over time. In our opinion, although the Continuous Assessment is in part related to the subject taught, it is also true that as a pedagogical tool some features should be common to all subjects, especially in a specific diploma.
We, also, want to learn from the experience of sharing it with the attendees as we believe that this could be a great opportunity to improve our understanding of this form of assessment by the advices and suggestions that probably will arise from the discussion.