The Effect of Assessing Students Based on Their Class Work and Homework Performance on the Overall Academic Achievement of Students

Continuous assessment, mainly tests, and assignments, help students to actively engage in the learning process. However, these assessments have been the only type of assessment in most Ethiopian universities, and they affect the student’s academic performance from time to time. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effect of assessing students based on their class work and homework performance on the overall academic achievement of students. This study is conducted on 4th-year Environmental Engineering undergraduate students. The class contains 25 students of which 6 of them were female. In this study, both primary and secondary data were used. The primary data includes test results, observation, and interviews, and the secondary data was collected from reviewing different published articles. The overall achievement of the students was measured in terms of test results. The collected data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel 2016. The test results before the intervention indicate the average values of test 1 and test 2 were 5.96±1.57 and 5.56±1.76 respectively. It is also noted that there is no significant difference (P>0.05) between the two test results. Among the various factors, six major factors that significantly affect the student’s academic performance were identified through observations. Previous schooling, family income, student’s self-motivation, teacher’s delivery style, and assessment are the identified significant factor. The interview result was obtained before the application of the intervention. The result indicates that only 20% of the students are happy with the intervention and thinks that it will affect the improvement of their grade. The majority of the students (72%) are unhappy and think the opposite of the idea and the remaining 8% choose to be abstentious. After the implementation of the intervention, the student's grade improved for both test 1 (7.60±1.04) and test 2 (7.00±1.15). There is also a significant difference (P<0.05) between the student's test results before and after the intervention. It can be concluded that the intervention significantly improves the student's test scores, which in turn improves their overall performance. However, further research has to be conducted for enhancing the student's academic performance.