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‘STANDARDS’ AND ‘MARKING CRITERIA’: HONEST ATTEMPTS AT IMPOSSIBLE TASKS?

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Modern Languages and European Studies

Rita Balestrini

Rita Balestrini

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

‘Accountability’ and ‘measurability’

• Increasing demand to articulate explicitly the standards of assessment and to make them transparent in an analytical marking scheme

– Growing expectation of public accountability

– Ideas of good educational practice

• Increase the transparency and reliability of assessment

• Foster autonomy and self-regulation in students

• Make marking easier for markers (?!)

Marking schemes make ‘criteria’ and ‘standards’ accessible to all

• If criteria are explicitly stated and standards clearly described they become automatically accessible to all: assessors, learners, and any other third party

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• Objection Satisfactory justification of a mark does not come from a marking scheme but comes when the student accepts the justification provided by the rubric (Gottlieb & Moroye, 2016)

Is the climate changing?

https://www.teachingandlearning.ie/priority-themes/enhancement-theme-2016-2018/ 12/3/2017

Framework for Transforming Assessment in HE (HEA 2016)

ASSESSMENT LACKS PRECISION

“(In order) to share standards in higher education, there has been an overemphasis on detailing criteria and levels. Using explicit criteria cannot capture all the different aspects of quality”

“Limits to the extent that standards can be articulated explicitly must be recognised”

A Marked Improvement. Transforming assessment in HE (HEA 2012)

• Rubrics are not useful for measuring and evaluating complex performances and skills

• Unpredictable variety of ‘responses’ – Considering more qualitative aspects does not solve the

problem (Sadler, 2013; Bloxam, 2013)

• Analytic rubrics imply a steady increase in skills and fail to acknowledge the role of setbacks in learning They foster a mistaken idea of learning and create wrong expectations in students

• Promote a false sense of objectivity in marking and grading

The assessment of ‘complex performance’

Measurement on a linear scale

Basic principle

Equal numerical increments correspond to equal increments on the underlying elements

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Quantitative specifiers: excellent, good, moderate, marginal, thorough, limited, adequate, weak, poor, lacking Modifiers: generally, very, mostly, some, often, markedly, virtually (Sadler, 2013)

‘Grading is judgement not measurement’ (Yorke, 2011)

• Grading complex performance requires professional judgements more than measurement

• Grading decisions are holistic

• Assessors work backwards

– holistic judgement awarding of marks to criteria =

justified grade decision (Bloxham, Boyd & Orr, 2011; Brooks, 2012)

• Difficulty of transferring the tacit knowledge of the standards outside a concrete context of students’ work

Using exemplars

• Criteria and standards can be better communicated by discussing exemplars

• Exemplars provide samples of assessment standards in practice

• Rubrics on their own cannot deliver what they promise

O’Donovan, Price & Rust, 2004

The UoR Curriculum Framework

Assessment is for learning

Balance between formative and summative assessment

Formative assessment prepares well for summative assessment

Feedback feeds forward

It is regular, accessible, thorough, and timely

The task of teachers is not to provide judgements about quality and advice on how to improve them. It is to teach students how to judge quality and modify their own work during production (Sadler, 2013: 55)

We need to be pragmatic and try to find a balance between different purposes of assessment and possibly reconcile the contradictory effects of these different purposes (Bloxham & Boyd, 2007: 45)

Bell, A., Mladenovic, R. and Price, M. 2013. Students’ perceptions of the usefulness of marking guides, grade descriptors and annotated exemplars. Assessment and evaluation in Higher Education 38 (7): 769-788. Bloxham, S. 2013. Building ‘standard’ frameworks. The role of guidance and feedback in supporting the achievement of learners. In S. Merry et al. (eds.) 2013. Reconceptualising feedback in Higher Education. Abingdon: Routledge, 64-74. Bloxham, S. and Boyd, P. 2007. Developing effective assessment in Higher Education. A practical guide. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill International. Bloxham, S., Boyd, P. and Orr, S. 2011. Mark my words: the role of assessment criteria in UK higher education grading practices. Studies in Higher Education 36 (6): 655-670. Bloxam, S., den-Outer, B., Hudson J. and Price M. 2016. Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria. Assessment in Higher Education 41 (3): 466-481. Brooks, V. 2012. Marking as judgement. Research Papers in Education. 27 (1): 63-80. Ecclestone, K. 2001. ‘I know a 2: I when I see it’: understanding criteria for degree classification in franchized university programmes. Journal of Further and Higher Education 25 (3): 301-313. Gottlieb, D. and Moroye, C. M. 2016. The perceptive imperative: Connoisseurship and the temptation of rubrics. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13 (2): 104-120. HEA, 2012. A Marked Improvement. Transforming assessment in HE. York: Higher Education Academy. Merry, S., Price, M., Carless, D. and Taras, M. (eds.) 2013. Reconceptualising feedback in Higher Education. Abingdon: Routledge. O’Donovan, B., Price, M. and Rust, C. 2004. Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria. Teaching in Higher Education 9 (3): 325-335. Sadler, D. R. 2013. The futility of attempting to codify academic achievement standards. Higher Education 67 (3): 273-288. Sadler, D. R. 2013. ‘Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading’. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 34 (2): 159-179. Yorke, M. 2011. Summative assessment dealing. Dealing with the ‘Measurement Fallacy’. Studies in Higher Education 36 (3): 251-273.

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