Kubiszyn and Borich (2010) stated in their common work that “any good classroom test begins with your objectives”, thus stating one of their central viewpoints on how the classroom assessment should be organized.
The essence of these words and their real meaning, in my opinion, are the following: you need to set clear and understandable goals and the criteria for successful achievement of those goals in order to ensure that your students master the knowledge and skills you want them to have. Without obvious criteria for assessment the students will be less motivated in working, because they would be unsure of the results of their effort. Of course, students are more likely to perform the task they understand well. The purpose of teacher’s planning is to make sure that the task is practically useful and applicable in real life, so that the students don’t get to ask themselves why they are doing this or that.
Moreover, setting the objectives will seriously help you to establish and preserve the authority a teacher should have in the classroom. The meaning of it is that if your authority is ever questioned, you’ll have something to refer to and give a somehow “legal” basis to your decisions to grade the papers or the projects. It is important to set up multiple choice questions and other forms of control so that there is only one possible correct answer. Here, ambiguity would be a bad thing. If the task involves “independent thinking” and giving personal opinion, the grading principle should not include judging the students’ position as such. It should focus on the level of “independence” of thinking, and relevance of the answer to the aforementioned topic. Also, the quality of writing and the grammar should be minded, but it is not the opinion of the student that has to be evaluated.
