Assessment styles and students’ mental health at Bangladeshi private universities

Abstract

The onset of COVID-19 has brought about drastic changes in everyone’s lives, especially of the student body. Although students are seen to perform well academically during the lockdown, the social media is strewn with cries of deteriorating mental health due to the sudden shift of some private universities from offline to online medium. The purpose of this study is to officially recognize those cries to depict the relationship between online assessment and mental health so that they can work together in harmony instead of one sabotaging the other. Four private universities have participated in this study. The participant selection is done through purposive sampling so that they fit the purposes of the study. The data collection procedure involved taking screenshots of mental health issues in relation to online assessment of undergraduate students’ Facebook posts of the respective university groups and conducting semi-structured interviews of undergraduate students. In total, 27 screenshots were taken and 16 interviews, conducted. Pseudonyms are used to refer to the participants. The researcher has used a conceptual framework by combining some established theoretical knowledge on depression, anxiety and burnout, drawn from official medical websites. Analysis of the data involved relating the elements to the students by transcribing the interviews including the hesitations, generating distinct codes upon reading the transcript, generating themes and subsequent themes from the codes derived. The data was then thematically analysed to relate the elements – depression, anxiety and burnout to the students based on the findings. The findings revealed that although there are few advantages such as availability of recorded lectures, majority of the participants faced great difficulties with the onset of the online semester and its coursework – the disadvantages such as isolation, alienation and rise of mental and physical health issues, such as depression and finger joint aches, outweigh the little advantage they enjoyed; and there are some participants for whom the change made no difference, suggesting that the online assessment style have worsened students’ mental health. Analyzing the data showed that particular modes of assessment made the students experience the symptoms outlined for depression, anxiety and burnout in the literature review of this study to a great extent because those assessment styles broke the principles of assessment - validity, reliability, practicality and authenticity, resulting in a negative washback. The researcher concluded that, indeed the online assessment style worsened the students’ mental health – they have depression – particularly, functional depression, burnout, generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder, given that it was absent during their pre-pandemic times.