Assessment 2026

WELCOME TO THE RISE ASSESSMENT PROCESS:

Once you have earned 300 Rise points, there are a number of options available to you. Earning 300 points has already earned you transcript recognition AND if you’re on an eligible programme you can also register for the Rise assessment in order to earn credit that might improve your overall grade for this academic year.

If you would like to explore taking the Rise assessment, please speak to your programme team about whether you have eligibility in your programme.

You can come and meet the Rise team on Wednesday afternoons in the Student Jobs Hub in Geoffrey Manton Building, pop along to meet the team from 1pm – 2.30pm its great to chat in person.

The deadline for the Rise assessment is: Monday 27th April 2026, 9pm

Scroll down to enrol before April 1st 2026

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ARE YOU ELIGIBLE?

Speak to or email your programme team, personal tutor or Unit lead to find out if your course has the eligibility of an options unit, which will allow you to undertake the Rise assessment.

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WHAT IS THE RISE ASSESSMENT ALL ABOUT?

The Rise assessment is called a portfolio, this means it can take any format you wish to submit. For example: a written piece, a video, a podcast, a visual and text based portfolio, a presentation that you speak over, a blog or website, or a mix of all these…

The most important part is that you choose a method that will effectively tell your learning journey through your Rise experience(s). For each of these submission options there is guidance on how long it will need to comparatively in these different mediums in the FAQs below, so please check this carefully.

The assessment is an exploration of learning, your understanding of yourself and your development, and you application of your learning on your future aspirations. We ask you to explore how you learnt through the experiences you have had with Rise, discuss and communicate how you have developed and how you understand yourself, and consider how reflecting on your own learning will impact your future. You are at the centre of your assessment, and the Learning Outcomes ask you to centre yourself at all times to reflect on what you have learned, how you learnt it, and what impact this reflection on learning will have.

WHAT IS REFLECTIVE PRACTICE

Reflection is a type of critical thinking that supports you to learn from your experiences, and is an important personal and professional skill.  

Reflection includes looking back critically and reflective practice pushes you to consider how this changes your future actions – a key personal and professional skill. 

In this video Kate and Fiona use what we call a reflective model, this is something that a person has designed to be an academic method for you to follow to unpack your learning, through reflection. What? So What? What Next? (Driscoll 1994) is an excellent model if you would like to look further, read this.

If you are interested in other models for reflection, take a look at this resource from Cambridge Library

Take at look at Man Met’s Future me plan toolkit for reflection here

LEARNING OUTCOMES

LO1: Explore ways you have learned through your experience(s) and what this means to you.

LO2: Communicate how your understanding of yourself has developed by reflecting on your experience(s).

LO3: Consider how you will apply your learning and reflection in the future and the impact this will have.

ASSESSMENT MATRIX & COVER SHEET:

The assessment matrix is here to be used as a guide for your assessment. By referring to the matrix you can ensure your submission covers all learning outcomes. Consider how the language changes between grade boundaries and utilise this to help your reflection.

DOWNLOAD THIS COVER SHEET FOR YOUR SUBMISSION:

YOUR REFLECTIVE PRACTICE:

To help you produce your exploration of learning throughout Rise experiences, we will ask you to utilise a WHAT? WHY? HOW? approach to think about your experience(s). This means we want you to move away from only describing what happened, the WHAT? is important for framing your submission but is only one third of each learning outcome.

We encourage you to ask WHY? about everything – why did you think that way? Why has the experience and reflecting on your experience been beneficial? Consider why the Rise experience has been impactful and the ways you will utilise this. We hope to see questioning of yourself, your experience, and different ways to understand what happened through your curiosity.

The HOW asks you to move from what happened to how your experience(s) impacted you – how you felt, how you responded, how it has (or hasn’t) impacted you as a learner/your sense of self/your future. We want to know how you have defined what this experience means to you.

The bottom line is whatever you do, there is learning and self development for you. This assignment is an investigation into how you can surface what this impact is, why it has been impactful, and how you will use this learning in your future.

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Using What, Why, How:

Some example questions you might ask yourself for each learning outcome:

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CENTRE YOURSELF & YOUR LEARNING:

The Rise assessment asks you to talk from your perspective about experiences you have been through, and surface what you learnt, why this has been important to learn and reflect upon, and how reflecting on this learning is impactful to your future.

This type of personal and reflective exploration, encourages you to speak from the first person, so we expect to see sentences that include “I…”

You can centre yourself and include other’s perspectives, in fact this helps you better understand yourself and shows us you have researched beyond your experience to reflect deeply.

DEVELOPING YOUR VOICE:

Reflection on experience is a very active process. What does this mean? Well, it is not linear or simple, it can be messy to reflect, it can be tangled and going through a reflective process doesn’t always result in a smooth neat package at the end. So, acknowledging this, we invite you to share your process of reflecting in its messy format. We do no ask that you make it sound any different that how it seems, we don’t ask you smooth over sections or answer all the questions that you asked.

We want honesty – let us know how the experience was for you and how you have evolved through it – exploring the learning from success and failure alike.

It is vital that you don’t think we want to hear about how good Rise is either. When you reflect/write/speak, can you ask yourself “why” at the end of each sentence or statement? If the answer is “yes”, then there is more to uncover. Avoid unexplored sentences like ” It was fun.”, “It was boring “, “I learnt a lot.” – Why was it fun, why were you disengaged, what and how did you learn? Did you learn it all in the moment, or has some time passed and you now realise that you learnt something in retrospect… BE CURIOUS!

Time and space are both useful when it comes to reflecting. We recommend only choosing a couple of experiences at most to reflect on in order to get enough depth. They may be similar or be more of a compare and contrast. Either work. Use you word count wisely to really consider what your story is and what you wish to consider.

REFERENCING & CONNECTING TO OTHER SOURCES:

If reflective practice is new to you, then thinking about how to include referencing may not feel obvious, so here is what we’d like you to consider.

1. Is your thought original? If it’s not – who said it first? This needs referencing. For example, you might have got involved in a specific activity because you were inspired by someone who had spoken on the theme of the activity.
2. When exploring your why, you might find yourself considering why others have reflected on the same issues as you, the way we learn, or why we behave in certain ways… By researching what others have said or thought before you, will provide a good point for deeper reflection.
3. Be honest about what has influenced you and your thinking. Whilst we encourage academic research where appropriate, we are also interested in who or what else might have influenced you in your reflection – perhaps a podcast, a book or something you’ve watched. Take your time to think about this, we are often influenced without always being conscious of it, so your questions to yourself as you write should include “why do I think this way? How have I come to have this lens of the world and my experiences in it.?”

A really good video about including external sources in your reflective practice can be found here. It relates directly to nursing, but trust us – it is useful for anyone!

USING AI TO PRODUCE YOUR ASSIGNMENT IN RISE

Rise has a really great resource on how to use AI in academic contexts: AI Literacy Self Study Pack

AI is a hot topic and something at the university we embrace it, if you’re using it well. It is no different within this assessment, and the key is discernment. If you are going to use AI to support your assessment, how are you going to use it develop your reflection? For example, perhaps it can give you ideas of deeper questions to consider or recommend further reading around topics you’ve unearthed that you’d like to explore within your reflection. AI is also a great tool for sifting through lots of research to summarise an article and see if it is worth you reading to then add to your deeper reflection.

One thing AI can’t do however is live your experiences for you. YOUR lived experience and the lens through which you are learning is yours and yours alone.

We have read assessments where students have used AI to write what they “think” we want to hear – lots of big and complex ideas, or flowery language. These mean nothing without YOU in the centre of your narrative. So be brave. Be honest. Be personal. Reflect authentically for yourself and find out something about yourself.

AI is a welcomed tool to support you, but use it wisely. Use it to help your research, wider reading, copy editing, helping to organise your bibliography, but not to reflect for you – it just cannot do that!

ENROL NOW…

FAQs