Fair determination of student grades from marks

Schools and departments in Australian universities assess students in their units through a number of assessment components. Often these are grouped as internal (or in-semester) components and an end of semester examination. Scores are added to derive a total that is then used to assign an assessed grade to the student. Typically, to ensure that students do not neglect either of the two main assessment components, policies define minimal performance standards for each component. The paper examines common practices in making decisions at the Pass/Fail boundary, the mathematical fundamentals in the application of these policies and inherent in marks, and proposes that one of two processes be used involving error-estimation by the markers. It recommends that one of these approaches should be adopted in preference to the traditional one-mark process.