3.2.5 Forms of marking and assessment
Schools vary in practice with regard to marking strategies but within agreed limits set down by the University. As made clear in the Assessment Policies and Procedures paper marking strategies should be appropriate both for the form of assessment and for the subject disciplines, and they should be in accordance with best practice in that discipline.
The use of programme specifications, graduate attributes and mark descriptors in setting and marking assessments is a process that applies to all Schools. The content and form of these will differ dependent on each discipline's needs.
Role of External Examiners and Deans: External Examiners and Deans have a role both before and after examinations. Grade descriptors, forms of assessment, the details of examinations and coursework should be reviewed by External Examiners and Deans. After the assessment, work is reviewed by External Examiners and all proposed module grades are subject to final approval by the Dean of the relevant Faculty, who has the power to return proposed module grades to School for review.
Examination and Coursework Setting: All assessments should test the relevant intended learning outcomes. To this end the form, level and content of any assessment should be appropriate to the module. It is important to be clear at the outset of teaching a module what it is that students should achieve, both in terms of knowledge and the other attributes that teaching and learning should foster.
Academic Misconduct: It is important in setting any assessment to attempt to reduce the likelihood of academic misconduct. For example, very generic questions are more likely to have an answer that can be downloaded or purchased. Questions should reflect the specific teaching delivered in a manner that requires a focused response and continual assessments should be varied from year-to-year to minimize the opportunity for copying.
Volume of Assessment: This should relate explicitly to the credit weighting of the module. It is inappropriate to use either too much or too little assessment. The credit weighting of a module is calculated on hours of study: one credit is worth ten hours of study. This should be reflected in the volume of assessment.
Various forms of assessment can be used: Programmes of study should include a range of different forms of assessment that will be suited to different discipline requirements and challenge students accordingly. Though it will often be appropriate, it is not necessary to include different forms of assessment within one module. The use of different forms of assessment within and between modules is permitted, within the context of programmes of study in which the different component parts will serve different educational ends. It is expected that there will be a coherent strategy that reviews the portfolio of assessments used in the modules constituting a programme of study, to ensure that it contains enough variety and complementarity of assessment. Moreover, it is important to consider the timing of assessments, such that students can pace their work appropriately. Various forms of assessment include, inter alia:
3.2.5.1 Examinations
- Unseen Examinations: These are standard end of module examinations.
- Seen Examinations: In which students are told the questions in advance, but still attend an examination to complete the assessment. These offer the opportunity to revise for and reflect on specific questions.
- Take away Examinations: In which students write exam essays in their own time away from a standard examination hall setting.
- Multiple Choice Questions: These are explicit tests of knowledge, often based on recognition memory but capable of being used to test other skills. Guessing corrections can be applied if required but if they are going to be used, students must be informed in advance of the assessment.
- Short note Answers (Gobbets): These are tests of knowledge based on the recall of information rather than recognition. These have the potential to be marked semi-quantitatively if questions are drafted such that key words, phrases or ideas must be presented in order to earn marks.
3.2.5.2 Coursework
- Group Work and Single Author Work: The majority of assessment will be of individual students, but group working is not discouraged. Group work is when two or more students collaborate in the production of a collectively authored assessment. Team working (that is when two or more students work together on a project or class assignment) is an attribute that Higher Education should encourage, and does not necessarily imply the production of collectively authored assessments. Group working should not constitute more than one fifth of an undergraduate programme or one third the work of a taught postgraduate programme, and often will be much less (down to nothing if appropriate for a particular discipline). The particular problems associated with the assessment of group work are discussed below.
- Dissertations: These may be of varying length, from very short pieces of journalism to final year extended study dissertations.
- Practical Class or Fieldwork Reports: These will often be presented in the form of a scientific paper (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, references) or in some other appropriately structured format.
- Poster Presentations, Oral Reports and Viva Voce Examinations: Are all appropriate forms of assessment for many disciplines.
- Alternative Forms of Assessment: Schools are at liberty to develop alternative forms of assessment, particularly for use in resit examinations. These must be discussed with and approved by External Examiners and the appropriate Dean(s).
- Other forms of Assessment: The forms of assessment are continually developing and changing, in response to (for example) emerging discipline needs or technological capability. Schools are encouraged to develop new forms of assessment, in consultation with External Examiners and the appropriate Dean(s).
3.2.5.3 Different forms of assessment require different forms of marking
It is important to consider when setting assessments – either examinations or coursework – what the appropriate form of marking will be. Various types of marking include, inter alia:
- Quantitative: Marking that requires the accumulation of marks through a series of short exercises or problems producing a cumulative mark for the whole piece.
- Qualitative: Marking that requires academic judgments about the quality of a piece of work, typically written work. For this, factorized grade descriptors are valuable marking tools.
- Competency-Based Marking: Common in cases where it is important that standards of competency be demonstrated by the student and maintained in the discipline; Medicine provides clear examples of this.
- Marking in Percentage Scales: Will be appropriate for many quantitative exercises in which marks are accumulated across a series of exercises or steps within a larger problem.
- Marking in other Scales: Certain forms of assessment will produce marks out of a particular number (N). For example, multiple choice questionnaires can contain any number of elements that will produce an overall mark of X/N. Marking short answer questions (gobbets) might produce marks of this nature.
- Marking on the Common Reporting Scale: Marking on the Common Reporting Scale is most appropriate for longer items of written work, including coursework essays, examination essays or dissertations and reports. The use of factorized grade descriptors enables an explicit reference to be made to the knowledge and attributes that the work seeks to test and develop. Care must be taken when marking on the 20 point scale: being able to make twenty clearly discriminable judgments is feasible, but more than this requires examiners to be confident of the ability to discriminate at finer levels of resolution. It is not recommend that anything more than half-marks be attempted. The combined mark of two members of staff, or the combination of marks from a series of essays, can be reported to one decimal place.
- Marking Oral Reports: The use of clear criteria for the marking of both the content and form of an oral presentation should be available to students in advance of the exercise being undertaken. A written record of the assessment, made at the time of the oral presentation, should be available for feedback purposes. It is recommended that more than one assessor should be present during the oral presentation, but if this is not possible it is particularly important to have very clear marking criteria and written notes to show the student(s) and External Examiners how the mark has been arrived at.
- Marking Poster Presentations: The use of clear criteria for the marking of both the content and form of the poster should be available to students in advance of the exercise being undertaken.
- Peer Assessment: Is the assessment made by one student of another students' work. (This is also known as peer-to-peer assessment.) Peer assessment should not normally constitute more than 25% of the work of a module (see Assessment Policies and Procedures). The use of peer-to-peer assessment has value in making transparent to students how assessment criteria work in practice. Further information on the use of these methods can be found at the Higher Education Academy. [1]
Note that factorized mark descriptors can be used for many different forms of assessment such as written work, oral presentations and posters and can be made suitable for the level and nature of the work in question. All that is required is that consideration be given to what it is that the assessment is trying to achieve, with subsequent marking according to those factors.
- http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment/group.html
- http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/hlst/resources/detail/resources/casestudy_peer_assessment
3.2.5.4 Double marking
It is made clear in Assessment Policies and Procedures that some Schools use blind double marking; in some others, the second marker has the advantage of the comments of the first marker. The External Examiner should be briefed about the School practices and has the right to comment.
A student’s final module grade should not normally be awarded on the basis of a single individual’s marking of all elements, and in exceptional cases where this does occur, this should be notified clearly to the External Examiner and to the relevant Dean(s). The identification of second markers is the responsibility of the Head of School (or other delegate).
A second marker may be appointed outwith the School or University, if necessary, for example when an appropriate specialist is not available in the University.
3.2.5.5 Group work
This presents particular difficulties for the assessment of individual students. When group work has been done, it must be possible to assign marks to individual students, rather than automatically award the same mark to every student in a group. If this is not possible (that is, all students in the group are to receive the same mark for the work) the group element should not constitute more than one fifth the overall grade for an undergraduate module (levels 1000–4000) or one third the overall grade for a taught postgraduate module (level 5000).
It is important to be able to recognize the contribution of each individual student to group work. For this reason when group work has been done, it should normally be possible to assign marks to individual students, rather than automatically award the same mark to every student in a group. In those cases where individual marks are assigned to students for group work, those marks used to differentiate individual contributions to an assessment must be apportioned such that when combined with marks from individually assessed work more than 50% of the module grade has come from individually assessed material. (This idea complies with the earlier reference that ‘the majority of assessment will be of individual students’.)
A particular difficulty occurs when academic misconduct is detected in group work, raising the possibility that all students in a group might have to accept the consequences of the actions of one unidentified member, which could have serious (and potentially inequitable) consequences. The importance of clear guidance to the group regarding academic misconduct cannot be overemphasized. It should be a matter of normal practice that, when group work has taken place, the group as a whole should submit a collective account of "who did what", in the form of an outline of the principal responsibilities of each group member. In addition, each chapter or section should have one person who is accountable: this does not necessarily mean that it is singly authored, but that one person accepts accountability, including collating material detailing how the part was written. Difficulty can arise when one chapter incorporates sections written by different group members, because it can be difficult, if plagiarism is detected, to identify authorship. It is best practice to allow each major section of work (chapters, laboratory report sections etc) to be written by one individual and then commented on by others, minimizing the risk that plagiarized text be included and clarifying responsibility for the text. In the case of detected plagiarism, the accountable person would be the first point for establishing responsibility. Furthermore, detailed notes on the collection of data, resource and information should be kept by each student and be available for inspection by other students and staff.