Session 5.6: Equity assessment between disciplines in the BSc program

Collyer, C., Guss, M., Bedding, T., and Fekete, A

Traditionally, merit grades have been awarded largely on a norm-referenced (with scaling) basis so that within a certain range a relatively constant proportion of the class will achieve a proportion of grades. These proportions have been refined over a number of years to provide some basis for equity of examination results particularly in cases where most students are shared between schools and some between faculties. Guidelines are generally met within the Science Faculty; however it has been observed that no school has ever argued for awarding fewer merit grades, even though some may have especially weak cohorts. Analysis of our data suggest that interpretations of Academic Board guidelines, which propose a single merit grade distribution for all fields, are inequitable and inappropriate. In particular, it is also unwise and inefficient to leave it to each School /Department to argue in an ad hoc way for varying from the stated percentages. Merit grade distributions in each subject area (with sufficiently large numbers of students) might be expected to reflect the quality of the student cohort, unless some special circumstances are identified. We have developed web based software to provide Schools with a comparison of distributions of incoming AAMs with the distributions of results awarded. The intention is to make Schools and course coordinators aware of the equity issue. These tools can scale the grades to more closely match AAMs to be returned to the Student Centre. This may promote outcomes that more equally reflect cohort quality.