Clear, accurate, consistent and timely information on the assessment system, assessment tasks and procedures should be made available to students, staff and other external assessors or examiners.

Clear, accurate, consistent and timely information on the assessment methods, purpose of assessment, procedures, timing and criteria should be accessible and communicated to students, staff and other external assessors or examiners. Staff and students need to engage in ongoing dialogue about expectations and standards to achieve a shared understanding of assessment processes and practices. Students should have opportunities to develop and demonstrate the competence and confidence to evaluate the quality of their work against agreed standards. As Sadler suggests, in order to improve, students must have the capacity to monitor and evaluate the quality of their own work during actual production (Sadler, 1989: 119). This means that they need to have an appreciation of what high quality work is and need to be equipped with the evaluative skills needed to compare the quality of what they are producing to assessment standards that they understand. Therefore, assessment design should explicitly address the means by which assessment literacy will be developed, for example, through formative assessment, use of exemplars, marking exercises, activities which engage students in dialogue about assessment criteria, etc.

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