Diagnostic Assessments
Diagnostic assessments are designed to get an idea of student's base knowledge on a subject. These might be things like pre-tests or discussions on a topic that occur before the content is presented. Diagnostic assessments may be used as a way to see what your students already know. before starting a topic or module. One advantage is the ability to customize and/or personalize learning with the understanding that not every student starts with the same base-level knowledge. This also helps you determine misconceptions students may have about a certain topic/content. Because these are fairly informal, it can be a bit challenging for students to complete these without motivation or points attached, especially in online environments.
Formative assessments allow students to practice their skills and measure student (and instructor) progress on a topic. A key element to formative assessments is the ability for students to get feedback to improve their learning, but are generally not graded (besides on completion). Examples of these might be self-assessments, drafts of student work, or informal discussions. Formative assessments are typically designed around the outcomes to help students prepare for the summative assessments.
Summative Assessments
Summative assessments are written to directly assess the student learning outcomes and the learning that has taken place. Feedback is used here to explain how the students met/did not meet the course and/or module level outcomes. These are typically graded and considered more of a high stakes assessment. Examples include exams, projects, presentations, essays, etc...
What about Cheating or Generative AI?
I recently heard a student say, "online courses are just setup so students can cheat!" Ugh - not what we want to hear, right? It's actually a myth that students can cheat more easily in an online course vs. a face-to-face course. Most of the research shows that faculty tend to believe that students will cheat more in online courses, but in practice, academic integrity issues are about the same for both modalities, according to a survey from Wiley (2022). There are several ways to promote academic integrity for assessments. Many instructors will use Respondus Lockdown Browser, proctored exams, strict time limits and/or plagiarism detection software for online summative assessments. Or, as an alternative, Lederman (2020) in his "Inside Higher Ed" article argues that a shift in pedagogy towards student engagement and authentic assessment is a better approach. Using tools such as AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard,, etc... create new challenges. Bottom line - many of the same underlying principles apply to AI as they have to any other tool in the past (mobile phones, smartwatches, computers, etc..). A clear policy for your course that defines how these tools can/cannot be used should be added to the course syllabus and clearly communicated to students. This is also a great opportunity to consider implementing some different types of summative assessments such as projects, portfolios, or other authentic assessments that are more difficult for AI tools to generate.