Take a breath–this is my one non-corona blog this week.  Since it’s exam time and people are experimenting with new ways of assessment in the midst of an emergency, my mind has been turning around the issue of different methods of marking and assessment.  Not different approaches to grading (which is a whole other story – especially since Canada is one of the very few and possibly only country in the world where there is not a standard national approach to grading, and yes Carleton, I am looking at your deeply weird 12-point system): different approaches to assessing students’ work and delivering feedback.

In Canada, of course, the Professor reigns supreme.  Professors set the assignments, they (or their assistants) mark the assignments, and their word is pretty much the law.  For large classes, the teaching assistants will usually get some kind of rubric of things to look for – what constitutes an A, B, C, etc., and designing those rubrics constitute a kind of self-imposed rigour to the awarding of grades.  In more computationally-inclined classes, this freedom is a bit more theoretical (less scope for professor interpretation), but in the humanities and social sciences profs certainly have quite a bit of leeway to mark as they see fit.  This is all part of the dominant North American ideology of “professorial classroom sovereignty” in which professors essentially design, deliver and effectively own individual courses.  No one–but no one–tells them what to do inside their classroom.

But this is not the only possible approach.  Take Western Governor’s University (WGU) for instance.  There, the role of the Canadian professor is split into three – the people who design the course and the assessments are different from the people who teach the course who in turn are separate from the ones who evaluate student work.  This is only partly a matter of greater returns through specialization – it also allows you to look at instructor quality over time, based on how well their students perform on assessments as designed and marked by others. 

Ok, you say, but that’s an American online university.  Surely what works in that kind of institution can’t work in a “real” university?  Well, why not take a look at how marking is handled in the United Kingdom, which (last I checked) was full of “real” universities.  There, instructors mark all the assignments, but for significant assignments (i.e. not including quizzes and the like), every piece of work gets assessed twice, once by the instructor, and once by a “moderator”, who is usually another academic in the same department (in some institutions the practice is that this burden is mostly taken on by more senior academics, but I am not sure if that is universal).  For a better sense of what these double marking arrangements look like, see this institutional page describing moderation at the University of Edinburgh.  And then, on top of that, each department will have an external examiner – that is, not from the university, who spot-checks student assignments to ensure that the marking is occurring on a consistent basis (a good institutional manual for external examiners is here).   In cases where it is not, the examiners can bring the issue to the attention of the department in order to rectify things.

Now the purpose behind these procedures in the UK is fundamentally different than the one behind those at WGU.  One is about specialization and efficiency, the other is about redundancy.  The reason UK universities work this way is about fairness: students have a much harder time arguing a mark when it goes through two sets of eyes rather than one.  And that third set of eyes?  Largely, they are there to make sure that one institution is actually upholding the standards it claims to have; in other words, they are a form of quality control.

Of course, the basis of this quality control is similar to what we see at WGU: strong, clear rubrics for each assignment – whether written by independent course designers or by the instructors themselves – that try to define the difference between great, good and mediocre in student work in such a way that different examiners should be able to come to the same conclusion about quality.  Not everyone believes this actually works in practice, of course (see for instance this Times Higher story on the difficulty of getting moderators’ assessments to match up).  But the sheer amount of work that goes into the process in the name of fairness and quality control speaks at least for the degree of concern about these objectives, if not actual efficacy in achieving them.

Each system has its merits and drawbacks, of course, and these models are not easily exported.  But it is worth thinking sometimes about the price-tag our doctrine of “professorial classroom sovereignty” carries: specifically, in reduced ability to seek gains from specialization, concerns about fairness in grading, and quality control.  It would be mighty interesting if one institution or even a faculty here in Canada gave some of these alternate marking strategies a whirl.  We might decide our system is on the whole better: but I am also pretty sure we would learn a lot that would improve assessment along the way.

Stay safe, everyone. 

PS. a quick couple of questions for you: I get the sense that now that the initial wave of the emergency has passed, that people are really eager to talk to people at other institutions, especially as there is no prospect of any conferences or much professional development this year.  So, I’m noodling over the possibility of delivering a one or two webinars a week, maybe one focused on the pandemic and the present (what’s everyone doing about Issue X?) and one on post-pandemic planning.  Format would definitely be synchronous and allow people to ask questions (though we could post audio for those who could not make it).  

Questions: Would you participate?  If not, would you watch/listen?  What would you want to talk/hear about?

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