In most courses I have taught in or reviewed, assessment weights rise across the term. The biggest and most-weighted task has been at the end, so students receive feedback on about half or less of their overall marks before the task that has the highest stakes. In redesigning PHCM9391 I tried to change this. The sequence is now front-weighted, so 70% of marks and feedback are finalised and returned before students submit the final task, even though this has been within relatively short ten-week Terms. I had two aims with this: to reduce stress for students at the point in term when other courses usually ramp up (noting most of this cohort also work full time), and to give students a clear sense of how they’re performing and where they stand, and how much effort the final task warrants, before they commit to it.

I paired this with scaffolding for the first task, a analysis looking at a real health organisation from the position of an internal planner. For many students this was the first analytic report they had ever written, and in 2023 students reported discomfort with analytic report writing. For Term 1 2024 I created a report template aligned to the marking rubric, asked two industry collaborators to check the task and template against what health planners produce, ran weekly anonymous check-in surveys whose results I discussed in every tutorial, and kept a Moodle FAQ that I updated twice a week. The proportion of students achieving a distinction or higher on the task rose from 75% in 2023 to 82% in 2024 using the same rubric, and assessment-related queries by email and Moodle forum posts fell by 61% (from 336 to 101).

Other convenors have taken up this approach. The convenors of two other core MHLM courses (PHCM9781 and PHCM9701) adopted the scaffolding from Term 2 2024, and several MHLM courses have since moved towards front- and middle-weighted assessment.

It has also influenced how students think about assessment in their own work. A colleague who took PHCM9391 as an MPH student while holding an academic leadership role in the tertiary sector, wrote to me that he had been looking for a practical example of assessment that moves away from escalating weights. He saw the 70% returned before the final task as supporting both assessment equity and student wellbeing, and he has since used the model as a benchmark and implemented it at another tertiary education provider where he works.