Background: Grading standards vary widely across undergraduate institutions. If, during the medical school admissions process, GPA is considered without reference to the institution attended, it will disadvantage applicants from undergraduate institutions employing rigorous grading standards. Method: A regression-based GPA institutional equating…

Among the many possible aspects to assessing writing, one of the most problematic is coherence. The problems with marking coherence arise because it is by nature subjective. However, the reasonable probability of several readers reaching a consensus concerning the coherence of a text suggests that it may be possible to assign relatively reliable…

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

While developing strategies to meet the needs of underprepared students, public colleges and universities across the nation are being faced with directives, often stemming from public viewpoint, state legislatures, and/or state governing bodies of higher education systems, to modify existing university programs in an effort to decrease the cost of…

Professors often expect students to have the skills that are necessary to participate in discussions. Students, on the other hand, have been trained to glean information from the lecture format; their prior experiences in discussions are likely to be limited to personal opinions on topics such as stem-cell research or evolution. Sudden changes in…

The Association Supporting Computer Users in Education (ASCUE) is a group of people interested in small college computing issues. It is a blend of people from all over the country who use computers in their teaching, academic support, and administrative support functions. ASCUE has a strong tradition of bringing its members together to pool their…

In this paper, the author looks at whether teachers give better subjective assessments to students of their own race and/or gender, conditionally on test scores. Subjective assessments are pervasive in schools; most teachers fill school records that include comments on the child's ability or behavior. And important decisions such as tracking,…

A significant aspect of recent reform efforts is a strong move to change assessment techniques. When the focus of the reform is on changing teachers' practices of assessment and evaluation of students, the issue of how they incorporate the mechanisms of assigning grades into their teaching becomes important. The purpose of this study was to…

The objective of this study was to determine the degree to which recommendations for passing scores, calculated on the basis of a traditional standard-setting methodology, might be affected by the mode (paper versus computer-screen prints) in which test items were presented to standard setting panelists. Results were based on the judgments of 31…

A study described and assessed a working experiential learning model used since 1976 as an adjunct to the basic speech communication course at the University College of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. In addition to class attendance, students in the basic course meet in a communication laboratory for one hour per week. The overall functioning of…

Teachers often act more like artists, in the sense that they tend to jump back and forth between new trends in pedagogy and theory. Meanwhile, the public, concerned that student evaluation as manifested in grading procedures rests on shaky ground, are losing faith in the credibility of their children's teachers. One way for teachers of all…

More attention is currently being paid to the distractors of a multiple-choice test item (Thissen, Steinberg, and Fitzpatrick, 1989). A systematic relationship exists between the keyed response and distractors in multiple-choice items (Levine and Drasgow, 1983). New scoring methods have been introduced, computer programs developed, and research…

Anecdotal testimony indicates that grade deflation is encouraged in many colleges and universities, especially in freshman writing courses. As a result, grading down has become a point of pride for some writing instructors. Instead of earning reputations as good, caring, committed teachers whose students do well because the teachers have worked…

Sample student learning contracts and job (task) cards, which have been used successfully with junior high school students, are collected in this document. The sample contracts in the areas of reading, writing, and language arts show a variety of formats and point systems for earning grades. The job cards, which can be placed in a learning…

A total of 47 twelfth grade students from five different English classes and the six teachers in the English department at a secondary school in Canada took part in a study to determine what effects traditional grade-based writing evaluation procedures had upon the process of writing. There were three distinct yet related components to the…