Discover How You’ll Be Assessed
At OpenClassrooms, our mentors and assessors do everything in their power to make the assessment a positive and constructive experience—an opportunity for you to progress! Their task is to help you learn how to meet the expectations of the professional world, drawing on their own experience.
What’s an assessor?
Assessors are mentors who have been working with students for some time and have decided to become assessors in addition to their mentorship role. Your mentor may be familiar with the great effort you have made with each project. We want a separate person to review your skills without that knowledge so they only focus on validating your skills. Assessors analyze students’ deliverables, manage project assessments, give constructive feedback, and confirm that you have proven your mastery of each skill.
What is the assessment based on?
Each project has specific, detailed assessment criteria, but only mentors and assessors can access them, for the sake of consistency. We try to avoid providing students with a rubric because of our real-world office design. Your boss won’t give you a rubric in future, so we want you to work on projects thinking of your future career. The assessor will verify whether you’ve acquired the skills targeted in the project, based on set assessment criteria. This ensures that each student’s work is assessed objectively.
What do I have to do for my assessment?
At the end of every project, you will:
Upload your deliverables to the OpenClassrooms platform. Your assessor will analyze them in detail and verify whether they meet the criteria.
Present your work during a project assessment. The project assessment is a conversation between you and your assessor, during which you’ll explain how you went about completing the project and answer questions in a professional manner.
Let’s look at how you can prepare for these two steps.
Upload Your Deliverables
You’re in the home stretch! You have to make sure your deliverables fulfill all the project requirements. Go back and reread your brief thoroughly, paying close attention to the requirements and expectations. Have you factored them all into your work?
If the answer is yes, you’re definitely ready for your project assessment. Talk it over with your mentor, who can confirm whether you’re ready and unlock the tool for reserving an assessment time slot. Find out in this article how to book your assessment slot.
Then you can finally upload your deliverables to the OpenClassrooms platform, under the Assessment tab on the project page.
Practice for Your Assessment
Project assessments generally follow this format:
You’ll present your project within a limited time frame.
You’ll answer your assessor’s questions.
You’ll debrief with your assessor, who will give you feedback and their overall impressions of your project.
Presenting your project in a clear and concise way isn’t always easy, and it can be nerve-wracking. If this aspect makes you feel nervous, don’t worry—there are techniques that can prepare you to give a great presentation! You’ll find a few of them below.
Technique 1: Practicing at Home
Record yourself practicing your project assessment. Set a timer and keep it within sight. Then listen to yourself and ask yourself these questions:
Am I getting my message across clearly?
Is my style of speech appropriate for my audience?
Am I using the right vocabulary?
Am I explaining my choices well?
You can follow this process as many times as you need to as your assessment approaches. The more you practice, the more ready you’ll feel!
Technique 2: The Mock Assessment
So you’ve practiced, but you’re still not feeling very confident. No need to panic—your mentor can help you by doing a mock assessment with you. A mock assessment is a mentoring session during which you rehearse your presentation, with your mentor playing the assessor’s role. The aim is to boost your confidence and for your mentor to offer you advice on how to handle the situation on the day.
Manage Your Stress During Your Assessment
Are you feeling anxious as your project assessment draws near? That’s totally normal! Here are some practical tips for reducing your stress level:
Take a break right before your assessment. Get some air, go for a walk, clear your head. You’ll feel refreshed and ready to go in no time!
Take time to breathe. Inhale slowly for four counts, then exhale slowly for six counts. Do this for at least one minute. Gradually, you’ll begin to feel calmer.
Look Back on Your Project
Once you’ve finished your project presentation—whether your project was approved the first time or it has to be reworked—it’s important to review what you took away from the experience. Ask yourself the following questions:
What skills did you acquire?
If you have to redo the project, which parts do you need to spend more time on? Less time on?
What will you do differently in your next project?
You can organize your post-assessment notes in a table. Here’s an example:
Project steps | Time spent | Time it should have taken | Takeaways |
Plan outline for deliverable X | 4 hours | 3 hours | Example: It’s best if I talk to my mentor right away if I have any concerns or questions about the project, so as not to waste time. |
Take course Y | 1 hour | 2 hours | Example: In the future, I’ll take the courses as soon as I start the project. |
Do research on Z | 3 hours | 1 hour | Example: I got bogged down doing research that wasn’t always helpful. Next time I’ll set myself a time limit so I don’t get sidetracked. |
To be completed | To be completed | To be completed | To be completed |
To be completed | To be completed | To be completed | To be completed |
That’s how you make progress—by getting into the habit of looking back at your past experiences and learning from them.
“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” - John Dewey, psychologist and philosopher.
Let’s Recap!
Most of your projects will be evaluated by an assessor—someone who’s not your mentor. An assessor is a professional in the field who’s there to give you feedback on your work.
Your assessor will analyze your deliverables and verify whether they meet the project’s assessment criteria. They will also discuss your project with you during a project assessment in which you’ll present and defend your work.
To prepare for your project assessment, you can practice presenting your project and arguing your choices, either by rehearsing at home or by doing a mock assessment with your mentor, if you feel the need.
Now you know how to complete a project from start to finish, from your first reading of your project brief to your assessment! What did you take away from this part of the course? Find out by taking the final quiz!
