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Perceptions of Students on the Fairness of Formative and Summative Assessments in Tanzanian Universities

errors that may result due to lecturer’s bias. The first error is generosity error whereby lecturers end at giving students higher scores that what they actually diverse. The second one is severity error whereby a lecturer does not think if a student can produce a quality work and therefore he ends at giving lower scores than what as actually disserved and the third error is the central tendency error whereby lecturers avoid giving either too high or too low scores to students but do grade them as average performers. All these errors may affect fairness of the assessment procedure. Farness in assessment calls for the elimination of all features that may either elevate or lower the score that a student gets apart from his ability and understanding on the tested contents. One of these features is cheating whereby Abstract: This study was conducted to assess the perception of university students on the fairness of formative and summative assessments conducted in Tanzanian universities. The study was guided by two specific objectives which aimed at finding out the perceptions of students on fairness of formative and summative assessments and identifying the sources of errors in assessment. The researcher adopted a cross sectional design which enabled them collect data from study respondents at one time. Third year students from universities offering teacher education in Tanzania were targeted whereby stratified sampling technique was used to obtain the study sample which consisted of 336 students selected from four universities. Questionnaires with open and closed ended questions were used to collect data and the collected data were analyzed descriptively in frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations and the hypothesis were tested using independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA. The study found students not to be well satisfied with the general assessment procedure; both formative and summative assessments were found to have the same level of fairness which was satisfactory. Moreover, lecturer, tools, and condition related factors were found to contribute to unfairness at the same basis. Lecturers in public universities were found to be favoring their students more than the ones in private universities. The study recommended universities to design and implement appropriate procedures so as to improve fairness in assessments.