Effect of Formative Assessment on Quantity Surveying Students’ Performance in 21st Century

Khor, Kai Rong (2021) Effect of Formative Assessment on Quantity Surveying Students’ Performance in 21st Century. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

The qualities of the graduates have been highly focused nowadays no matter in which industry. As the number of graduates produced by the HEIs are growing statistically year by year, but the amount that are truly involved and recognised by the industry is not increasing so drastically as compare to how the number of graduates produced by the HEIs have increased. Probing into the cause of the issue, it has been identified that the quality of the graduates produced by the HEIs are unable to satisfy the employers in the industry especially the employability skills of the graduates are the ones that are being pointed out lack the most in the graduates today. In such a challenging environment like the construction industry, the career of a quantity surveyor has demanded a lot on the readiness of the graduates to equip themselves with the necessary employability skills before entering the working market. The employability skills of a quantity surveyor is not just the knowledge and technical skills they learn during their period of studying in the HEIs but also soft skills like communication skills, collaboration skills, problem solving skills, creativity, independent and etc. This problem is understood solvable through transforming the currently overly focused summative assessment to more inclined towards using formative assessment in assessing the capability of the students. The literature review on the past researchers study on the formative assessments, it has shown that the formative assessments able to help both the educators and students to gain benefits from it. The formative assessments that are suitable for the technical students are rubrics assessment, performance based assessment, portfolio assessment, learner self-assessment and student responsive system. The characteristics and its similarities and differences in terms of its pros and cons, skills acquired and the stages of conducting theses assessments have been identified in XVI this research study through both literature review and the questionnaire results that involved a total of 100 respondents. Despite the disadvantages of each formative assessment causing the difficulties to fully implement it in the HEIs, but in the literature study also have identified the steps can be taken by HEIs for effective formative assessment system implementation and opinions on it have received from the respondents through face to face interview with 5 of the respondents. The results have shown these steps will be workable in the opinions of the respondents if these steps are taken by the HEIs in implementing the formative assessment system in the curriculum structure of the course in the condition that considerations and thoughtful planning have been done before the implementation of it. Hence, formative assessments should be the main selection choice by the lecturers when it comes to choosing an assessment method to assess the students and summative assessment should be the secondary choice, in order to produce the graduates that are deemed employable by the employers in the industry. Thus, the standard of the quality and quantity of the quantity surveyors produced by our country can be raised to another level that can compete with the best in the world.