Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading

By Sadler, Grifﬁth Research Online, D. R. Sadler *. 2009

494 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When assessment tasks are set for students in universities and colleges, a common practice is to advise them of the criteria that will be used for grading their responses. Various schemes for using multiple criteria have been widely advocated in the literature. Each scheme is designed to offer clear benefits for students. Breaking down holistic judgments into more manageable parts is seen as a way to increase openness for students and achieve more objectivity in grading. However, such approaches do not adequately represent the full complexity of multi‐criterion qualitative judgments, and can lead to distorted grading decisions. Six anomalies in the ways assessors approach the grading task are identified, together with several likely contributing factors. Overall, the conclusion is that explicit grading models do not have as strong a theoretical foundation as is commonly supposed, and that holistic appraisal merits further investigation.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e82437aab12202df86e21340a961fa8566316cf1

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Citations in the corpus

Does student engagement in self-assessment calibrate their judgement over time? (2013, methodology): “The degree programme used the web-based system to publish criteria that referred to the specifics of each task rather than ‘fixed sets of criteria’ (Sadler 2009, 159).”
Mark my words: the role of assessment criteria in UK higher education grading practices (2011, background): “These ‘validating practices’ (Shay 2004 ) are designed to make the processes and judgements of assessment more transparent to staff and students, and to reduce the arbitrariness of staff decisions (Sadler 2009a ).”
Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal (2010, background): “These qualities are, of course, usually called criteria (Sadler 2009b).”
Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria (2016, background): “This tends to reinforce arguments about the holistic nature of judgement (Sadler 2009), where assessors will balance different aspects of a piece of work.”
Assessment literacy and student learning: the case for explicitly developing students ‘assessment literacy’ (2013, background): “Outcomes of their research show that relying only on the explicit expression of assessment criteria, standards, and processes as a method of transferring knowledge about assessment does not work (see also Sadler 2009).”
Assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice (2017, background): “Rather than being a simple addition of scores, analytic approaches can incorporate complex logic (Sadler 2009a).”
The futility of attempting to codify academic achievement standards (2014, background): “If standards could be fixed and held stable over time, student achievement could be graded with integrity (Sadler 2009b), the performance of different cohorts of students could be compared, research on the effectiveness of teaching could be carried out, and general achievement levels in an academic…”
Generating dialogue in assessment feedback: exploring the use of interactive cover sheets (2010, background): “…or grade descriptors have been undermined because written descriptions generally do not have ‘unique meanings’ or fixed, context-free interpretation (Sadler 2009, 169) and they are written in the discourse of the academic discipline, inaccessible to those outside that community of practice.”