Assigning grades during an earthquake – shaken or stirred?

Abstract

In the event of an unanticipated disruption to normal life, universities tend to shift to an online environment in both delivery and assessment. Course instructors still need to assign grades despite not having the full set of planned assessments. This paper examines how grades are disrupted when an increased reliance is placed on online assessments. We find substantial grade disruption and grade inflation as the weighting on online assessments rises relative to invigilated assessments. Grade inflation can be moderated by scaling to an historical distribution of grades; however, such scaling can lead to substantial grade disruption where the quality of the cohort is different from the historical average.

Keywords:

• principles of economics
• online assessment
• student grades
• disruption to assessment
• earthquake

Notes

1. Throughout this paper we will use the naming convention YYYY-Sn to denote the year and semester of a course occurrence, where YYYY is the year and Sn is the semester (either S1 or S2).

2. GPA stands for ‘Grade Point Average’. GPA is awarded as follows: A+=9, A=8 etc down to E=–1. We use ‘GPA’ to map grades, which are alphabetical, to numerical values in order to carry out calculations. The authors acknowledge that when converting a single grade to a numerical value that that value does not constitute an ‘average’ in any sense, but the acronym GPA is widely used and well understood by most readers.

3. Students who scored more than 50% in the course overall but did not meet the minimum requirement in the final exam received a restricted (C–) pass, meaning they passed the course but could not use it as a pre-requisite for future courses.

4. Of the 155 students eligible to sit the special exam, only 103 actually did sit. Of those only 21 managed to improve their grade and eight of these were students who had not been able to attend the term test but were clearly good students. For those who had actually sat the term test, the highest grade they could be awarded was a C.

5. An aegrotat grade is awarded when a student misses a test or exam due to illness or other critical circumstance or when a student's performance in the test or exam is directly impacted by such circumstances. Hence, performance in tests and exams may not be truly reflective of ability or final grade.

6. Correlation coefficients are available from the authors on request.