In this work we analyze the final marks obtained by the students of the course Signals and Systems of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree at the E.U.I.T. de Telecomunicación in the Polytechnic University of Madrid when they are assessed by two different methods: in the first one students are assessed by means of a final exam only; in the second one students follow a continuous and formative assessment method: they are required to solve some open exercises almost every week and to fulfill self evaluation test every two weeks along the whole semester. During academic year 07/08, students of the course are assessed by both methods. Then we analyzed the final marks (in a 0-10 scale) obtained by the students and focus on the binary classification fail (mark lower than 5.0) /success (mark equal or greater than 5.0) when one or other assessment method is adopted. This work has been done with a sample of 210 students that were divided in 7 different groups with different teachers. We find that more than 70 % of the students where classified in the same group with both assessment methods. There are a 15 % students that failed with continuous assessment method (most of them either did not follow the coursework or obtained a mark around 4 by the continuous assessment method) but succeed in the final exam. We must not be worried about this group because can be considered as the student that prefer (and successfully do) the final exam. Finally, 15 % students succeed in the continuous assessment but failed the final exam (most of them with final exam mark over 3.5).
Afterwards we make simulations of which would be the student’s final marks when both assessment methods are combined with different weighting. Nowadays, this kind of combination is a common practice in many Universities, but usually the final exam counts with a high weight (60 to 80 %) of the final student mark. We find that when the final exam counts only 25% and the continuous assessment counts 75%, there is a mere 3% of the students that have final exam marks lower than 3.5 and obtain a weighted mark over 5.0. We can conclude that continuous assessment method gives us practically the same fail/success classification of students than the final exam.