Workshop: Grade analysis

Making fair judgments and setting fair assessments of student performance is a challenging task for teaching staff.  From clearly communicated learning goals, grading criteria, answer keys, assessment plans and rubrics, teaching staff employ a variety of tools during their courses to ensure their assessments are transparent, valid and reliable.

But what happens after these courses have finished, when all assignments have been submitted and all grading has been completed?  At this point, it is still essential to conduct item and grade analysis to consider the meaning behind test results and make further improvements to assessments in the future.

As an examiner, what can student results tell you? Are the scores higher than expected, are more students failing than usual, is the distribution of results non-Gaussian, should certain patterns in the data instantly ring alarm bells or can we really read anything into this at all?

In this workshop, we will discuss real cases and go through numerous examples to give you an idea of what you can glean from such data and become better informed about the quality of assessment in your departments.

Intended learning outcomes
In participating in this CPD activity, you will be able to:

• understand the basic principles of grade analysis such as reliability and validity,
• read and interpret a test analysis report,
• better judge the quality of an exam,
• better judge the standard setting and its consequences.

About the trainer
Jeroen Donkers is an assistant professor at the Department of Education at FHML. He is a psychometrical advisor for the Taskforce Assessment of the FHML and for the national inter-university workgroup Progress Testing Medicine (WIV).