Prospective graduate students are usually required to have attained an undergraduate degree in a related field and high prior grades to gain admission. There is consensus that some relatedness between the students' undergraduate and graduate programs is required for admission. We propose a new measurement for this relatedness using cosine…

The move from elite to mass systems of higher education has been accompanied by concerns relating to the quality of provision and standards, particularly in relation to the increasing proportion of higher grades awarded to students. Bayesian multilevel models were used to investigate the temporal trend of grade attainment in 101 higher education…

We examined the reliability of grading master's theses at a New Zealand university, where a variant of the academic journal review system is employed. The overall correlation between the grades recommended by internal and external markers of master's theses in psychology and applied psychology at this university was 0.39, which is similar to that…

Conceptualising feedback as dialogue places even greater importance on successful interpretation of the message as a crucial step leading to the uptake of feedback. This interpretation is not always straightforward as it takes place through a cultural and linguistic lens that international students bring to feedback conversations. This research…

High quality feedback on assessments and deliverables is vital to student success. This pilot study sought to understand the impact of combining positive and performance-gap feedback in an immediate feedback scenario where students were provided multiple attempts to complete an assignment. 176 online undergraduate students were surveyed after…

In this paper we examine the history and development of internal assessment practices at a university in New Zealand. The work re-visits the 'assessment arms race' study and builds upon the key arguments presented so far. It was discovered that student demand in the early 1970s triggered the introduction of internal assessment and workloads…

At many universities, student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used for determining promotion, tenure, and other financial benefits for professors, which gives incentive for them to try to increase their scores. However, previous research, mainly based on US data, indicates that SET scores not only depend on teaching effectiveness and quality,…

Many studies have found a relationship between students' self-reported procrastination and their grades. Few studies have used learning analytic data as a behavioural measure of procrastination in order to predict performance, and there is no systematic research on how this relationship may differ across assessments or disciplines. In this study…

Universities around the world are encouraging teachers to provide more constructive feedback to support student learning, but do teachers know how to distinguish constructive feedback? What pedagogical practice is considered as feedback and what is not? For example, is a rubric a type of feedback? To date, very limited research has answered these…

In-text comments, in the form of annotations on students' work, are a form of feedback information that should guide students to take action. Both the focus of the in-text comments, and the ways in which they are linguistically communicated, have potential to impact upon the way in which they are perceived by students. This study reports on an…

To foster lifelong learning skills, we need new didactic approaches with aligned assessment methods. Therefore, we investigated whether the outcomes of a project assignment show a different relation to learning strategies than a longitudinal knowledge-based assessment. We studied learning strategies of first year students of medicine and…

Contract cheating sites advertise that they provide high quality, undetectable, bespoke work delivered in a timely manner to students purchasing their assignments. This paper tests contract cheating sites' promises about the products they sell. We built on previous reported research examining contract cheating sites' persuasive features which were…

In this study, we suggest combining the monitoring of actual examination time used with grades in order to assess examination time extensions in terms of access provision and expected outcome. Using naturally-occurring data collected from a large sample (N = 2315) of undergraduate engineering students, we argue that extended examination time may…

Research on feedback has focused more on generating feedback rather than on how students use it and implement it; that is, what type of cognitive, metacognitive or affective activity students engage in once they have received feedback. In order to visualize feedback use and implementation, a quasi-experimental study was carried out. Students were…

A modified essay is an open-ended question about clinical presentations, with the goal to test application of basic science principles to novel scenarios. Due to high reliability and validity, multiple-choice question (MCQ) examinations are more commonly used. We have employed a combination of MCQ and modified essay examinations in medical school.…