Setting standards for student assessment

Abstract

The increase in litigation by students who are dissatisfied with their assessment, and to a lesser extent the time and monetary costs of student appeals makes it imperative that institutions adopt a robust assessment strategy. The concern of consumers with respect to professional services offered by students after graduation is also an issue. This paper examines issues round the ‘borderline method’ of standard setting, using regression analysis. The paper will present data from two cohorts of students, and will examine the benefits and problems associated with this method. Increasingly academic institutions are being required to improve the validity of assessment processes; often this is at the expense of reliability. The new assessment procedures often have different assessors, have practical aspects which cannot be replicated across the cohort, and therefore raise issues with respect to the robustness of the comparative student grading mechanism. This issue has been particularly important in the field of medical education for a number of years; with medical students in the latter stages of their courses being required to demonstrate competence in a variety of different simulated clinical activities with different patients, in front of different assessors in different hospitals and on different days. This poses serious questions in the robustness of setting the pass–fail boundary and to a lesser extent the honours boundaries.