During the pandemic crisis, COVID-19 induced substantive changes in teaching, learning and assessment across higher education. It is timely to consider how traditional assessment practices can/should be reframed, to potentiate learning, to increase student engagement and to offer all students equal opportunities to succeed.

The recent ‘next step insights’ on assessments by the Irish ‘National Forum for The Enhancement of Teaching and Learning’ [¹] list 10 lessons learned from these challenging times. It is important to strongly consider alternative assessment formats beyond in-house proctored tests; to address equity issues and offer all students identical opportunities to succeed through the implementation of innovative and diverse assessment arrangements; to reconsider the use high stakes periodic assessments of learning in favor of a ‘blend’ of other possibilities; to work with students in partnership in the design of assessment policies to enhance student assessment literacy and ownership; to develop institutional structures that support teachers in the redesign of assessments; to promote and debate academic integrity in assessment practices; to debate the role of remote proctoring in assessment, to strengthen trust in assessment by all who are involved; to implement assessments that respect the evidence collected before the pandemic and, finally, to make the most of ‘collaborative, programmatic and institutional strategies’ [²] to address the vulnerabilities of assessment systems. These recommendations call for action at the institutional, departmental and individual levels of education communities. What, then, is within range of each teacher?

Assessment should be aligned with learning goals, be embedded in the curriculum, and in teaching and learning approaches. Aligning assessment programs with well-designed curricula and appropriate teaching approaches is crucial to ensure student success. Teachers can reexamine their approaches and believes about how such alignment can best be achieved, in their specific teaching contexts. Assessment programs should be research informed, thus, teachers need to develop their literacy about assessing student learning. Unfortunately, institutions have unwritten beliefs and unintended perspectives on curriculum and assessment (the equivalent to ‘hidden curricula’ at the assessment level) that are unintentionally assimilated and practiced by teaching staff and unquestioned by students. For example, there is an agreement that high stakes final exams, often with no follow up feedback to students other than a mark, make the most adequate use of assessments in education. This is not what educational research has demonstrated. The literature also offers useful research informed models to address contemporary challenges such as equity, student agency and transparency in assessments - an example is the EAT Framework [³]. The enhancement of the understanding of the fundamental assessment principles has perhaps never ben as urgent, in face of the recognition of the vulnerabilities in assessment.

A simple start is to use the heuristics ‘assessment of/for/as learning’. Assessments ‘of’ learning subsume that, assessments are a means to ‘measure’ an ‘amount’ of learning by students. Tests and grades are principal elements and assessment of learning is dominant in traditional approaches. Assessment ‘for’ learning emphasizes the importance of assessments to generate information that students can use to orient their learning journey. Frequent feedback to students is crucial and the integration of digital technologies hold huge potential here, providing instant and personalized feedback. Assessment ‘as’ learning considers that having students play assessor roles is a crucial learning experience. For example, students can be involved ‘as self or peer assessors, as co-creators of assessment activities and marking criteria’ [⁴]. Assessment ‘for’ or ‘as’ learning should be embraced and mastered as heuristics for improving assessment programs.