Higher education leaders face growing pressure to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of not only their institution but also each academic program offering. With increasing accountability and limited time for meaningful reflection on student learning and development, now is the time to rethink how a quasi-annual academic program review…

School leaders struggle in their efforts to implement standards-based grading reforms in large part because they fail to address the inconsistency in grading practices among individual teachers. This article describes three crucial steps necessary to gain greater consistency in teachers' grading practices: (1) Reaching consensus on a purpose…

In June 2023, the Supreme Court held that the admissions systems at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Harvard University were racially discriminatory, effectively ending affirmative action. Are race-neutral admissions policies at selective K-12 schools next? Bob Kim considers two circuit court cases -- "Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax…

Traditionally in England, exam results in General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) (and before them O levels) and A levels have been reported as letter grades, with A (or A*) as the top grade, then B, C etc. The reforms gave the opportunity to revisit the arguments for different formats of reporting, and Cambridge Assessment contributed…

Teaching evaluation is a central process across institutions for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure. While there is a rich literature on methods for evaluating teaching, there is less scholarship on the goals and processes for reforming systems of teaching evaluation. Surprisingly, there is little to no information on teaching criteria at…

Admission systems play a critical role in shaping educational opportunities by determining what choices are available to whom. Policy makers and institutions must balance multiple, often conflicting, goals which requires trade-offs between competing values. In this paper, we present core values for admission to higher education alongside a novel…

This paper describes, and lays out an argument for, the use of a procedure to help groups of reviewers to judge the quality of prior research reports. It argues why such a procedure is needed, and how other existing approaches are only relevant to some kinds of research, meaning that a review or synthesis cannot successfully combine quality…

Direct Admissions is a system developed and piloted recently in the US that defaults graduating high school students into post-secondary admittance by data-matching their profiles (transcripts, standardized test scores, and prerequisites) with institutions' preset eligibility criteria. As applicant and institutional interest in direct admissions…

Literature inclusion and exclusion (E/I) criteria are a fundamental selection methodology in different applications. Mainly, the E/I criteria are identified and chosen with respect to the question for which the manuscript itself is produced, thus allowing the selection of the literature. This procedure is not always related to the economic…

Much has been written about how to improve the fairness of AI tools for decision-making but less has been said about how to approach this new field from the perspective of philosophy of education. My goal in this paper is to bring together criteria from the general algorithmic fairness literature with prominent values of justice defended by…

In the past decade, moderated mediation analysis has been extensively and increasingly employed in social and behavioral sciences. With its widespread use, it is particularly important to ensure the moderated mediation analysis will not bring spurious results. Spurious effects have been studied in both mediation and moderation analysis, but this…

A systematic review is a type of literature review that aims to collect and analyse all available evidence from the literature on a particular topic. The process of screening and identifying eligible articles from the vast amounts of literature is a time-consuming task. Specialised software has been developed to aid in the screening process and…

We describe the development and implementation of a holistic annual review process for nontenure-line faculty in the management department at a large, research university. We also discuss the department's evolution from solely utilizing Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) to a broader array of review criteria, developed by the department's…

This paper describes the Berlin "Abitur" examination in the twentieth century and its written documentation in files. By the late nineteenth century, the "Abitur" examination was fully established in Prussia and with it a graduation certificate that was obligatory for university entrance. Thus, the "Abitur"…

For over 30 years, the notion of authentic assessment in higher education has been adopted in academic practice, but it has managed to escape substantial critique. Although there have been multiple definitions and operationalisations of authentic assessment, current practice tends to foreground mimicking of work tasks. Authenticity cannot be…