An outlook on self-assessment of homework assignments in higher mathematics education

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel self-assessment method in higher mathematics education, where students mark their own homework and receive credit, aiming to balance student-centered learning with assessment fairness.

Contribution

It introduces a new self-assessment approach in higher mathematics courses and analyzes its impact through student feedback and comparison with teacher grading.

Findings

Students provided positive feedback on self-assessment.

Self-marked tasks showed comparable quality to teacher-marked tasks.

The approach helps balance learning and assessment responsibilities.

Abstract

We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. In our setting, the students of the course have to mark a part of their homework assignments themselves and they receive the corresponding credit without that any later changes are carried out by the teacher. In this way we seek to correct the imbalance between student-centered learning arrangements and assessment concepts that keep the privilege to grade (or mark) completely with the teacher. We present results in the form of student feedback from a course on functional analysis for 3rd and 4th year students. Moreover we analyze marking results from two courses on real analysis. Here, we compare tasks marked by the teacher and tasks marked by the students.