The following report of descriptive statistics gives the passing percentages of the Bar examination for the Thurgood Marshall School of Law (TMSL) for the calendar years of 2005-2009. A Five Year Analysis is given for the entire period, followed by Annual Analyses. This report is meant to serve as a continual update of the progress of the Law…

A focus on mathematical understanding and problem solving in math education has developed a need to implement alternate ways of testing to better assess the students' understanding and problem solving skills. The seventh national school curriculum (MOE, 1997) for mathematics in Korea was revised to the current curriculum (MOEHRD, 2007) to…

In high-stakes writing assessments, rater training in the use of a rating scale does not eliminate variability in grade attribution. This realisation has been accompanied by research that explores possible sources of rater variability, such as rater background or rating scale type. However, there has been little consideration thus far of…

In the fall of 2004, Benedict College--a Historically Black College in Columbia, SC--began enforcing a new grading policy called Success Equals Effort (SE[squared]). Under this policy, students taking freshman and sophomore level courses were assigned grades that explicitly rewarded not only content learning ("knowledge" grade) but also…

The aim of the present research was to compare the use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as an examination method, to the examination based on constructed-response questions (CRQs). Despite that MCQs have an advantage concerning objectivity in the grading process and speed in production of results, they also introduce an error in the final…

Wake County Public School System's (WCPSS) 102 elementary schools have implemented standards-based grading. This grading practice is aligned with North Carolina's Student Accountability Standards and the WCPSS Promotion/Intervention policy. Standards-based report cards were designed to reflect student mastery of state standards and provide an…

Education leaders and much literature exhort teachers and school leaders to use data more often and more effectively to guide planning and decision making--called, "data driven decision making." This term is ubiquitous in literature and reform discourse, but "on the ground," so to speak, practitioners face significant challenges in analyzing,…

Several studies show that teachers make use of grading practices to affect students' effort and achievement. Generally linearity is assumed in the grading equation, while it is everyone's experience that grading practices are frequently non-linear. Representing grading practices as linear can be misleading both from a descriptive and a…

Grade inflation in academic institutions. Is it a subject so complex and pervasive in education that it defies resolution? The issue of grade inflation is of concern to college students, faculty, administrators and future employers. There is much gnashing of teeth, some veiled threats, wringing of hands, and both written and oral discussion of the…

The aim of the Bologna Process is to make higher education systems across Europe more transparent. It is crucial for this purpose that confusion concerning the characteristics of the systems should be replaced by conformity. But, as we will show, conformity brought about at one level may create confusion at another. The curricular aspect of the…

Corporate trainers and business leaders recognize the importance of competition and the importance of motivating employees to connect with the company's mission. Instructors in many business disciplines have included games, simulations, and contests in their courses. The QuizBowl Quest is designed to apply established motivation and active…

The way teachers' in Sweden reason about assessment and grading in physical education and health is in focus in this article. The central question is to investigate what teachers' believe are the goals of the subject, important knowledge in the subject and criteria for assessment in physical education (PE) health. With this study we take up a…

College and university instructors who assess student writing, including but not limited to teachers of first-year composition, sometimes keep the gate. Gatekeeping by writing instructors is an activity directly related to grading practices and, in many cases, to grading practices which emphasize formal, mechanical, usually sentence-level choices…

This article details the implementation and use of a "Review Stage" within the CAP (computerised assessment by peers) tool as part of the assessment process for a post-graduate module in e-learning. It reports upon the effect of providing the students with a "second chance" in marking and commenting their peers' essays having been able to view the…

In this investigation I explore teachers' perspectives on just grade allocation. The study was carried out among language, math and science teachers in a national sample of Israeli high schools, where teachers were required to weigh a set of considerations that are used in the decision on grade allocation. Findings suggest that (a) a teacher's…