- Departmental differences
- Student Gamesmanship: choose courses with higher grades (e.g., to inflate GPA to meet Education requirements)
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Some departments may attract better students
- Grading Practices
- norm- vs criterion-referenced grading
Norm-referencing increasingly in decline, but hard sciences often remain last bastion of traditional assessment attitudes
- Peer and self-evaluation: Many authors identify peer and self-evaluation with declining standards, though my own experience suggests that many (particularly female) students are harder on themselves than the instructors
- group work can allow weak students to inflate their grades on coat-tails of group (anecdote).
- Plagiarism Internet increases concerns that less able students cheating their way to undeserved grades.
| - Higher grades used to encourage learning
highest inflation among marginal students to encourage learning - Faculty grading criteria
Aside from Faculty of Education, most university faculty have no formal training in assessment and consequently, the validity and reliability of their grading practices must be suspect - Faculty behaviour
- have to respond to high grades in colleague's sections
- easier to give high than low grade (do not have to justify high grades)
- new faculty worked with inflated grades in their careers
- blurring of faculty-student relationship erodes objectivity
- faculty may be better trained in evaluation technique and so moving away from talent hunt models (i.e., away from norm-referencing and away from belief that high failure rate = high standards, rather than weak teaching)
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