Session 5.1: How academic communities assure assessment standards

Assessment is often a highly individualistic process firmly grounded in the particular contexts of the teachers’ and learners’ experiences of a unit of study. However while assessment should focus on the individual learner’s needs - there is also a need to ensure that the standards we apply to assessment are equivalent across different learners and across different units of study and different courses and faculties and even across different universities.

This session will consider the range of strategies used in faculties to assure the standard of grades awarded in assessment. It will draw on data gathered by the Dean’s nominees on the EQA Working Group in 2005. The group identified existing strategies used to “assure” the standard of grades in their faculties as part of the university’s move towards a standards referenced assessment. There was a considerable variation in the strategies used in different faculties, but broadly speaking the strategies reflected combinations of four different approaches: 1) Processes around education and development of staff skills relating to assessment 2) Peer review and collaborative involvement in assessment e.g. peer review of standards, co-marking, panel decisions 3) Modification of results through scaling
And 4) Use of common grade descriptors

The identification and sharing of these strategies highlighted many of the challenges the university community faces in dealing with this complex and important issue. The session will provide a brief overview of the different strategies used to assure standards and highlight the strengths and limitations of these. There will be structured opportunities for participants to debate and challenge existing strategies as well as identify new strategies and the institutional support required to implement these.