How finely grained does summative assessment need to be?

Abstract

Assessors in higher education are often faced with the need to grade student work on lengthy scales. Is such fine granularity in assessment really necessary? The question can be addressed at different levels of the assessment system: here the focus is on the difference that would be made to honours degree classifications if so‐called percentage grades were replaced by grades on a very much shorter scale. Detailed analysis of the complete assessment records of 144 Law students on a modular scheme in a university in the UK showed that the difference was not large, and derived mainly from the way in which sub‐modular grades were combined. Some implications of the findings are discussed, which have relevance beyond higher education in the UK.

Keywords:

• assessment
• grading system
• outcomes
• degree performance
• honours classification

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Graham Taylor‐Russell and Harvey Woolf for their help with this study, though responsibility for the content of this article is mine alone. I am also grateful for the very constructive comments from anonymous referees on an earlier draft.