ABSTRACT
Assessment serves several different purposes. First, it lets you know how you are getting on throughout your studies. The marks you get week by week, or semester by semester, are a barometer of your progress that you can use to steer your way towards your final grade. Second, assessment tells your tutors how you are getting on. This is useful to them as they try to give you the most constructive and helpful advice that they can, and it also provides evidence that can, and usually will, be chalked up against your name as part of some final course grade. Third, assessment, especially the cumulative final score or degree result, provides a label that will be attached to you and will follow you out of university and into the big bad world of job-hunting, or whatever you choose to do next. To your dying day it will tell you, and everyone else, how well you did at university.
