Easy marking fears linger

THERE is a great deal of debate over whether student assessments are easier today than they were in years gone by.

THERE is a great deal of debate - publicly but even more so in academic circles - over whether student assessments are easier today than they were in years gone by; in particular, whether grading is lighter than it used to be.

Gigi Foster, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW, used an Australian Research Council grant to examine whether international students were getting informal exemptions for poor English skills. Tony English of Flinders University has long complained that international and domestic students are getting away with inadequate written language skills.

English's identification of the poor quality of domestic students' written work is important. We shouldn't fool ourselves that this is only a problem for students for whom English is a second language. There are plenty of students churned out by our high school system and granted entry by our universities who could be better at the written word. In fact, the decline of quality written expression is a generational problem. School teachers, university lecturers and even editors and sub-editors from generations X and Y (to generalise) aren't as well schooled in basic expression as previous generations were.

But coffee room discussions on university campuses about reasons behind light marking go further than international or generational issues. Two more potential causes of it are the academic assessment procedure for teaching quality and the pressure on academics to maintain "economically viable" courses, which translates to high student numbers.

Academics are assessed by four criteria (whether going for promotion or organisational advancement): community service, university service, research quality and output, and teaching. (Another more nebulous criterion is research grants, but that is worthy of an article all its own.)

Quality of teaching is a hard indicator on which to assess academics. The best - in some institutions, the only - method is student evaluation. While feedback is important, we need to be careful not to turn students into consumers in the evolving model of service-focused universities. Why? Because consumers - remembering the old adage the customer is always right - often like to think their essays and exams are worth higher grades than they receive. Does that mean academics who mark easily get higher student evaluations? Does it put pressure on academics to mark more lightly? That's a piece of empirical research I would love to see data on.

While the government is intent on pushing more students through university in the coming decades, not all disciplines are blessed with higher student demand. Those disciplines, worthwhile as scholarly interests, are under significant pressure in the modern university environment. Do academics teaching in these disciplines feel under pressure to mark more lightly to retain students in their subject areas? Indeed, are academics in popular disciplines tempted to mark more lightly to attain or retain student interest ahead of colleagues teaching in similar fields?

I recall as an undergraduate being aware of which academics marked harder and avoiding their units.

These are meaty questions and no one should think academics aren't alive to them. Universities do what they can to avoid inconsistencies in marking between academics. For example, several institutions apply the bell curve to marking. But that has its own problems.

Whether the sense some academics have that they need to pass students or mark lightly is created by the present environment or is just a figment of their imagination matters not. It is there and it needs addressing.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.