This paper discusses the use of specification grading in sport management courses. The process organizes assignments around grading bundles and evaluates students as either Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory in meeting each assignment. A token system is created to provide flexibility to the students. There are advantages to using specification…

A decision consistency (DC) index is an estimate of the consistency of a classification decision on an exam. More specifically, DC estimates the percentage of examinees that would have the same classification decision on an exam if they were to retake the same or a parallel form of the exam again without memory of taking the exam the first time.…

To help students cope with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions offered students flexible grading policies that blended traditional letter grades with alternative grading options such as the pass--fail or credit--no credit options. This study conducted an in-depth analysis of the flexible grading policy at a…

In the profession of education, predicting students' academic success is an essential responsibility. This study introduces a novel methodology for predicting students' pass or fail outcome in certain courses. The system utilises academic, demographic, emotional, and VLE sequence information of students. Traditional prediction methods often…

Variation in examiner stringency is a recognised problem in many standardised summative assessments of performance such as the OSCE. The stated strength of the OSCE is that such error might largely balance out over the exam as a whole. This study uses linear mixed models to estimate the impact of different factors (examiner, station, candidate and…

When colleges and universities quickly moved their classes online last March, many faculty members gave students the option of pass/fail (P/F) grading. Usually P/F implies a student must reach the minimum passing grade of D to be awarded a P. This brings up the question of what passing a course with a D means. How much of the course material did…

In fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading science,…

Pass rates are key assessment statistics which are calculated for nearly all high-stakes examinations. In this article, we define the terminal, first attempt, total attempts, and repeat attempts pass rates, and discuss the uses of each statistic. We also explain why in many situations one should expect the terminal pass rate to be the highest,…

The transition of the United States Medical License Exam Step 1 examination to pass/fail was implemented in January 2022 with the intent to reduce medical student stress levels while ensuring that students maintained a sufficient degree of medical knowledge in order to continue in their educational journey. While this is an admirable goal,…

We present a privacy-friendly early-detection framework to identify students at risk of failing in introductory programming courses at university. The framework was validated for two different courses with annual editions taken by higher education students (N = 2 080) and was found to be highly accurate and robust against variation in course…

Undergraduate research experiences provide engaging learning opportunities but are often not formally assessed for gains in knowledge and skills. This study examined undergraduate research assessment practices and the implementation of a satisfactory/unsatisfactory (S/U) research course in all academic units within a college of agricultural and…

Increasingly, basic science educators at medical and health science programs are faced with the challenge of delivering fundamental science content using evidence-based pedagogical approaches that build students' fund of knowledge while also supporting their development as self-regulated learners. This has led to an increased use of active…

Unforeseen complications during the administration of large-scale testing programs are inevitable and can prevent examinees from accessing all test material. For classification tests in which the primary purpose is to yield a decision, such as a pass/fail result, the current study investigated a model-based standard error approach, Bayesian…

Generally, some courses in a degree program, but not all, have a hurdle, threshold or minimum pass requirement, which is often described as a condition that must be met by a student in order to pass a course. As assessment drives learning for most university learners, and first year experience is critical for retention and success, understanding…

Subscore reporting under item response theory models has always been a challenge partly because the test length of each subdomain is limited for precisely locating individuals on multiple continua. Diagnostic classification models (DCMs), providing a pass/fail decision and associated probability of pass on each subdomain, are promising…