Abstract
Communicating national qualification standards clearly to learners and their teachers is crucial to raising standards. If people do not know what they must do to get the grade, then the qualification is providing poor information about what is considered valuable learning. Assessment scores (and grades) need to convey meaning about learners’ knowledge and skills. Yet score meaning is obscure, which leads to frustration on the part of teachers and learners. How standards are conceived, and set, interacts with score meaning. In this article, we outline how the current system of setting standards for GCSEs and A-levels in England, Wales and Northern Ireland—attainment-referencing—affects the clarity of grading standards. Attainment-referencing offers no single artefact to represent standards, as it is the product of an amalgam of evidence. This makes it difficult for learners and their teachers to derive score meaning from their assessment outcomes. We contrast this with other methods for setting and maintaining standards that have been suggested as better alternatives: norm- and criterion-referencing. Both, in their own ways, purport to offer greater clarity. However, norm-referencing does not relate directly to curriculum standards, but to learners’ ranks with respect to a population. Criterion-referencing relates directly to the curriculum but operates better in theory than in practise—criteria can never be specified unproblematically because of the limits of language. Within the context of how standards are currently set and maintained, attainment-referencing, we suggest ways of better explaining the curriculum-related meaning of national qualification grades.
Context and implications
Rationale for this study and why the new findings matter: Transparency of the requirements for the awarding of school exam grades is essential for supporting teaching and learning. Here, for the first time in the literature, we outline how approaches to standards—norm-referencing, criterion-referencing and attainment-referencing—impact grading transparency. Differences between school and higher education contexts are considered.
Implications for researchers, practitioners and policy makers: Periodically, public debates regarding the best way to set standards arise. Our analysis shows that whilst criterion-referencing and norm-referencing are transparent in some respects, neither delivers what teachers, students and other users of the exam results need to understand grading outcomes. Attainment-referencing takes into account aspects of the assessment context in which students perform. It is the system used for GCSEs and A-levels and has clear advantages in that context, but its reliance on multiple sources of evidence means it too fails to deliver complete transparency of grading requirements. Ultimately, perfect transparency of standards is unachievable in school or higher education assessments.