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Warner Brother's Magnum Force

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In Warner Brother’s 1973 motion picture Magnum Force, the lead character “Dirty Harry Callahan” says the often quoted line, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” This sentiment is very applicable to the assessment of student’s learning and the evaluation of instruction. Knowing your limitations through assessment and evaluation allows each group to know their strengths and weaknesses, and spend the appropriate amount of energy on capitalizing on the strengths and improving the weaknesses. It is especially applicable to assessment and evaluation problems in the arena of the many non-credit general interest courses that are taught at the community colleges in the province. Assessment and evaluation are particularly lacking here, usually being limited to a short check off course evaluation list at the end of the course. The student’s learning is never evaluated, as the institution gives no grading at the end of the course. What is missing is feedback to the students on how much and how well they were able to absorb the information presented in the course and meaningful feedback to the instructor on how they are performing their duties. Without this feedback the student has no independent method of assessing the level of their newly gained …show more content…

Waiting for the assessment to be done at the end of the course will increase the stress on the student, who will liken it to a final examination. More effort will be placed on trying to remember what happened early in the course rather than answering the question. This is not to say that the tests can not cumulative, indeed they should build upon the knowledge gained throughout the course. This repetition of ideas in the assessments will act as reinforcement to the learning of key ideas in the subject matter and allow the student to gain a deeper understanding of the

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