As the perceived characteristics of assessment seem to have a considerable impact on students’ ap-proaches to learning, the way we assess has the potential to drive and to support students’ learning. Therefore, this paper aims to give an insight into first year university students’ perceptions of their first examination of an Analysis I-course and consequences which arise from these perceptions on the basis of interviews. First results show that students perceive “calculation tasks” to be dominant over proofs in this assessment, whereby some students start to learn from selectively chosen tasks which are perceived to be relevant for the exam. For a development of assessment tasks that sup-port students’ learning, the embedding of those tasks in the context of lecture and exercise sheets and especially students’ perception of the tasks have to be taken into account.