Why do we need involve students into summative assessment?

I have been suspicious, even I myself conducted a survey about this topic, and I read an article about involving students into summative assessment. Because almost al people who heard this idea responded negatively.
They think:

  • Teacher get paid, so it’s teacher’s job to grade.
  • Students don’t know the topic as much as the teacher does.
  • Students don’t know what the teacher is looking for.
  • Students might not be honest when they are peer reviewing others’ work because
    • they don’t want to offend
    • they tend to be biased like
      • give a higher grade to their friends or a popular person
      • give a lower grade to someone they dislike (?)

But today when I am reading Davies & Wavering (1999), I read this: “Robert Claser’s term “assessments of enablement” (Wiggins, 1989) aptly describes the shift in focus generated by using alternative assessments”.

This inspires me think my topic from a new angle: to involve students into the summative assessment is to shift their focus from get a higher score to something else. But what is the “something else”? What can attract students’ attention from their final credits to something elase that interests them??
Engaging them into the learning?
How the summative assessment could engage them into learning??
No, I think the possible benefits would be engage them thinking into their future professional development after this summative assessment for this course/program.

Then maybe we could involve oCategoriesthers, but not students, into the final assessment, like teachers, administrators, student teachers, from local school. Actually, there has been someone who have already done this. Foote and Vermette (2001) did this in their article…

Can we recruit some outsiders from internet to review students’ e-portfolio as part of summative assessment? The thing is , summative assessment is really about accountability, so it would be hard to control its validity and reliability, especially validity, when outsider’s evaluation is included.

Then, let me think from another angle: if one of the purposes of alternative assessment is to shift students’ focus, how ?

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