The Reporter: assessing vocational group journalism projects

Abstract

Vocational journalism training and education throughout the world often thrives in a simulated environment, such as a student newspaper, which allows students to build transferable skills and exercise professional and practical judgement without significant risk. Assessing such projects can often be difficult because it is not easy to isolate individual from team effort, yet assessment of such projects is often required in order to calculate grades for degree or diploma classification. Innovative assessment strategies, like those described here, can ensure best practice for the students, yet take into account the practical difficulties of marking such simulations, which often require subjective evaluation. This paper explores some of these issues by examining a continuing, tutor/student-negotiated, group-marking method of assessing student achievement in a simulated vocational exercise such as a newspaper.