This article is personal and rather anecdotal as it is an attempt to sum up my experience of 30 years of Ofsted inspections. The key questions remain what they always were. How do you deal with the sometimes conflicting requirements of support and accountability, objectivity and impartiality, styles of inspection, reporting and grading? Perhaps…

Used correctly, assessments play a vital role in the success of a course: they provide valuable feedback to students regarding their knowledge gaps, encourage deeper understanding of the material, help students to develop critical thinking, and guide students to accomplish a course's learning goals. They also provide a signal to future employers,…

Automatic short-answer grading (ASAG) is a key component of intelligent tutoring systems. Deep learning is an advanced method to deal with recognizing textual entailment tasks in an end-to-end manner. However, deep learning methods for ASAG still remain challenging mainly because of the following two major reasons: (1) high-precision scoring…

The purpose of this study was to better understand factors that influenced academic fraudulent excuse making. Previous research shows that deception in many forms is very common (e.g., Austin et al., 2006; Griffin et al., 2015; Kapoor & Kaufman, 2021; Murdock & Anderman, 2006). Fraudulent excuse making has been predominantly studied…

Homework problem sets allow a student to measure personal understanding and enable an instructor to evaluate individual student and overall class performance. For this study, students were asked to self-grade their homework assignments for a junior-level Fundamentals of Transportation Engineering course. Although self-grading studies have been…

This paper presents the case of an adjunct university professor to illustrate the dilemma of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to grade student papers. The hypothetical case discusses the benefits of using a commercial AI service to grade student papers--including discretion, convenience, pedagogical merits of consistent feedback for…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore Pennsylvania public high school principals' leadership of grading practices reform and how that leadership was influenced by enabling and constraining factors within schools' cultures and communities. The analysis of the accounts of the lived experiences of 10 principals…

This study explores student perceptions of, and experiences with, labor-based contracting grading--an approach to student assessment that values labor rather than quality. In theory, labor-based contract grading reduces teacher bias and challenges inequities maintained by traditional grading. A qualitative content analysis of anonymous online…

This paper proposes to evaluate learning efficiency by implementing the flipped classroom and automatic source code evaluation based on the Kirkpatrick evaluation model in students of CS1 programming course. The experimentation was conducted with 82 students from two CS1 courses; an experimental group (EG = 56) and a control group (CG = 26). Each…

We conducted a systematic literature review on automated grading and feedback tools for programming education. We analysed 121 research papers from 2017 to 2021 inclusive and categorised them based on skills assessed, approach, language paradigm, degree of automation, and evaluation techniques. Most papers assess the correctness of assignments in…

"A Little Guide for Teachers: Efficient Marking" is full of highly innovative, practical and labour-saving strategies that shows busy teachers exactly how to provide feedback which moves learning forward, but which also inspires and motivates pupils to want to improve. "The Little Guide for Teachers" series is little in size…

The rationale for the use of comparative judgement (CJ) to help set grade boundaries is to provide a way of using expert judgement to identify and uphold certain minimum standards of performance rather than relying purely on statistical approaches such as comparable outcomes. This article summarises the results of recent trials of using CJ for…

In an educational context focused on student learning, class participation and feedback are key to improving students' performance. Class participation grading methods are often unclear and subjective, therefore, providing feedback on class participation grades is challenging for lecturers. In this study, the Work-In-Class Assessment Tool (WICAT)…

Assessors' perspectives on their evaluative practices remain relatively under-researched. Given evidence that higher education assessment and feedback continue to be problematic, this paper proposes a specific methodological innovation with potential to contribute both to research and practice in this area. It explores the potential of a…

A revision-based assessment system, driven by clear rubrics, can mean less stress, more effective feedback, and greater student learning. English teacher Alexis Wiggins shares an effective and time-friendly revision-based assessment system she developed that allows students to focus on learning, not their grade.