How will I be assessed? SMI courses have authentic assessment tasks which reflect as much as possible real world performance conditions and are designed to enable students to relate their learning to their workplace experience. The strengths of this type of assessment are that it helps students rehearse for the complex professional life and it involves meaningful and integrated tasks which motivates students to learn. Our students without access to a mine site have the option of basing their assessment tasks within the hypothetical 3D environment of the Virtual Mine CD-ROM. All assessment tasks are clearly described in terms of how they fit with the course learning goals. Each assessment item also includes the grading criteria used by the lecturers to make the marking process as transparent as possible. SMI lecturers provide detailed feedback to students about their assessment which includes the good or poor features of the assessed work, how the student can improve the piece of work and how they might do better work in the future.

Sample assessment task Sample assessment task: Environmental analysis