Fair and Student-Friendly Marking Criteria

Author: Dr Sam Saunders

Providing clear, precise and fair marking criteria is crucial to establishing students’ understanding of the parameters of their assessments, and are essential to help guide their completion of the assignment. Marking criteria are at their best when they are written in readable language, are communicated clearly to the students well in advance of the assessment’s submission, and are fairly and clearly applied in marking process.

Benefits

Fair and student-friendly marking criteria:

  • Help students understand the parameters and fairness of assessments.
  • Help assessments remain reliable and valid in the context of the wider module/programme
  • Ensure consistency and relevance across markers.
  • Ease your marking process by providing areas on which to focus.
  • Improve students’ confidence – knowing what they will be marked on helps students to worry less about their performance.

Putting it into Practice: Writing Assessment Criteria

Clear assessment criteria can be tricky to construct, but there are a number of useful starting points that can help make the process easier:

  • Consider your situation: are your criteria departmental- or assessment-specific? Assessment-specific marking criteria can be more engaging than generic departmental ones, so if you have an opportunity to implement this, it’s worth considering (Graham, Harner and Marsham, 2022).
  • Consider the way that the criteria are written. Do you think your students will be able to understand and apply them in their assessment? Are they as free of esoteric language (jargon) as possible, or if it is present, are you sure that your students are familiar with it?
  • Align your criteria with the learning outcomes that the assessment measures. What elements of the assessment will you be looking for to ensure that the learning outcome(s) have been met?
  • Consider whether you want to apply different weightings to different criteria, based on their size or relevance to the learning outcomes. Does the assessment place more of a focus on a students’ critical or analytical skill versus their presentation style? If so, you might want to consider weighting one criterion over another to ensure it has a greater impact on the overall mark.
  • Similarly, decide how much of a focus you want to have on academic standards, writing, referencing or presentation skills if you are formally weighting different criteria. Does this assignment focus strongly on these skills, or are they more secondary?
  • Consider your criteria in the context of comparable assessments on other modules.
  • Think about what a student might need to do to ensure a minimum pass mark versus a first-class mark, and avoid using a deficit model, where your criteria represent the gold-standard to which students can never reach. Criteria should always be achievable.
  • Ask a colleague to review them to make sure they are fair, clear, and on par with other assessments.

Going Further: Communicating Criteria to Students

A further important aspect of constructing effective marking criteria is communicating them to students. Try some of these tips to help students engage with your criteria:

  • Use part of a session to explore the criteria. Allow students the opportunity to use the criteria to mark a sample piece of work, or peer-mark a practice version of the assessment. Active use of the criteria in a formative exercise can help students clarify expectations and encourage dialogue between you and your students (Defeyter and McPartlin, 2007).
  • Involve students in the construction of criteria, as participation in the process is critical to improve engagement with the assessment (Meer and Chapman, 2015). Ask students to look at an assessment brief and construct their own criteria for marking it. Then discuss the similarities and differences between the criteria the devised, and your own criteria for the assessment. You may choose to update your criteria on the basis of what you learn from this.
  • More generally, spend time with your students deconstructing what it is you, or other markers, will be looking for and why they have been organised the way they have. Ensure this includes an opportunity for students to ask questions, too.

References

Defeyter, M. A. & McPartlin, P. L. (2007). Helping students understand essay marking criteria and feedback. Psychology Teaching Review, 13(1), 23-33.

Graham, A. I., Harner, C., & Marsham, S. (2022). Can assessment-specific marking criteria and electronic comment libraries increase student engagement with assessment and feedback? Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(7), 1071-1086.

Meer, N. & Chapman, A. (2015). Co-creation of marking criteria: Students as partners in the assessment process. Business and Management Education in HE, doi: 10.11120/bmhe.2014.00008.

Help and Feedback

Can you help us improve this resource or suggest a future one? Do you need this resource in an alternative format? Please contact us at cie@liverpool.ac.uk

 

Creative Commons Licence
Fair and Student Friendly Marking Criteria by Dr Sam Saunders is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.