Despite their widespread adoption and recognised benefits, rubrics have been critiqued for their potential misalignment with student needs. The voices of international students, who constitute a substantial portion of the higher education population, remain underrepresented. This study examines the perspectives of international undergraduate…

Student frustration with the level and content of feedback is well-noted, especially in relation to new or unfamiliar assessment types. At the same time, students are often unlikely to engage with marking and feedback processes, including the use of rubrics or marking criteria before submission. The aim of this project was to build students'…

Groupwork is a crucial aspect of work contexts and a key twenty first century skill. Assessment of groupwork provides a persistent challenge for educators in university contexts with students reporting experiences of unfairness from their peers during groupwork. This study developed a novel Peer Assessment Fairness Instrument to explore factors…

The analysis of exemplars of different quality is a potentially powerful tool in enabling students to understand assessment expectations and appreciate academic standards. Through a systematic review methodology, this paper synthesises exemplar-based research designs, exemplar implementation and the educational effects of exemplars. The review of…

It is increasingly important that higher education institutions be able to audit and evaluate the scope and efficacy of their digital learning resources across various scales. To date there has been little effort to address this need for a validated, appropriate, and simple-to-execute method that will facilitate such an audit, whether it be at the…

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions (HEIs). For the first time, part of the assessment included the wider impact of research. RAND Europe was commissioned to evaluate the assessment process of the impact element of REF submissions, and to explore the…

This summary reports on a pilot of a novel, ontology-based e-assessment system in accounting. The system, OeLe, uses emerging semantic technologies to offer an online assessment environment capable of marking students' free text answers to questions of a conceptual nature. It does this by matching their response with a "concept map" or…

This paper replies to points raised by the editors of the "ABS Guide", Huw Morris, Charles Harvey, Aidan Kelly and Michael Rowlinson (2011) "Accounting Education: an international journal", 20(6), pp. 561-573) in response to a paper published in a previous issue of "Accounting Education" (Hussain, S. (2011)…

How to compute and report subscores for a test that was originally designed for reporting scores on a unidimensional scale has been a topic of interest in recent years. In the research reported here, we describe an application of multidimensional item response theory to identify a subscore structure in a test designed for reporting results using a…

In February 2009, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) commissioned RAND Europe to review approaches to evaluating the impact of research as part of their wider work programme to develop new arrangements for the assessment and funding of research--referred to as the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The objectives were 1) to…

Within large scale educational assessment agencies in the UK, there has been a shift towards assessors marking digitally scanned copies rather than the original paper scripts that were traditionally used. This project uses extended essay examination scripts to consider whether the mode in which an essay is read potentially influences the…

Learning outcomes and their assessment has given rise to considerable debate as to whether outcomes should be graded or just pass/fail. Assessment models employing learning outcomes have been used for some time in the United Kingdom (UK) in further education programs for example National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and General National…

OSCE examinations were held in May and June 2002 for all third and fourth year and some fifth year medical students at the University of Leeds. There has been an arbitrary pass mark of 65% for these examinations. However, we recognise that it is important to adopt a systematic approach towards standard setting in all examinations so held a trial…