Scaling of Assessment Marks: A Case in the Faculty of Science, Eastern University, Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Scaling of marks or standardizing is a moderation process for the assessment marks to make a decision about the boundary points between the students‘ marks and the grades on a course. Scaling for assessment marks is done for the entire students of each course offered by the faculty. Scaling is not used to adjust for an individual student‘s marks, and the scaling is not used to adjust the final mark at the programme level when awarding a degree for the programme. In other words, scaling is used only to change the grade that contributes to the overall grade point average for the entire students for a particular course. In this study, the scaling methodology adopted by the Faculty of Science, Eastern University, Sri Lanka to assign letter grades for the raw marks obtained by the undergraduates for all the general degree courses was considered. The faculty prepared this scale grading table by reducing two or three marks from the minimum marks for each grade and then maintaining similar intervals in the original table. There were four different columns (tables) for the scaling of marks. Based on the average marks of a particular course, the appropriate column was selected and the grades were assigned. By applying the scale grading table, when the average marks were very low, the lower letter grades were improved to better letter grades while when the class average was high, there were no significant changes occurred in the letter grades awarded