Weighting?

August 14, 2006 2:57 PM

Have a query which I need to answer regarding grading practices in Higher Education

Does anyone know (UK, US, etc) if it is common for the supervisor's grade for an undergraduate dissertation - aka independent study or final year project, capstone, etc. - to be weighted at more than 50%?

To explain - where I work (a UK university) each project is marked by two markers, one is the supervisor and the other a second marker. Both grades are judged equal - in fact an agreed grade is sought.

There is a proposal to give the supervisor additional weighting, in effect to make their grade worth 60% or more. I've never heard of this or come across it anywhere else - is it common or unknown? Seems wrong to me, posing potential problems of favouritism and projects that mirror the supervisor (and so aren't very enterprising.)

Any view welcome

posted by A189Nut to Education (6 answers total)

In my law school appellate advocacy class, our and oral arguments were graded by our professor and three practicing attorneys. Our professor determined 40% of our grade while each of the others determined 20%. I thought it was extremely fair and adequately reflected our actual hard work and development in the class.
posted by MeetMegan at 3:07 PM on August 14, 2006

i don't know anything about how this is done procedurally, but here's my view:

if the grade is for the dissertation only, that is for the report turned in on paper, then it makes sense to have the supervisor and whatever second person's marks weighted equally.

if, however, the grade is for the dissertation and the research or whatever that was required to write the paper, then perhaps the supervisor's mark should be given a higher weight. presumably they worked with the student in carrying out the research and therefore can make a more informed assessment of the quality of the student's work.

note that i'm coming at this from a science sort of angle, where the lab work and the process are important. in a liberal arts context where research is mostly reading stuff in the library, such a distinction might not be relevant.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 6:25 PM on August 14, 2006

I've had a course where 100% of the final mark came down to one report / essay. This was quite common. Also, being in 'higher education' it is impossible to get away from favouritism. Certainly part of the whole thing is what you do, but its also who you know and who agrees with you.
posted by maxpower at 8:59 PM on August 14, 2006

I haven't seen this system before but it seems to me that the distinction between grading the paper and grading the body of work, which merely includes the paper, is an important one.

Please disregard maxpower's snark about the role of favoritism in academia. If it's true that it's "impossible to get away from favoritism" it's pretty much true everywhere, not just higher education.
posted by oddman at 10:59 PM on August 14, 2006

UK university here. Projects are marked by the supervisor and an assessor. It is not the case that these marks are independent, or equally weighted, but rather that a consensus is sought. Each reads the project, then the marks are decided in a meeting. If a consensus is not reached, then a third marker is called in.

My experience of this process is that both parties come in with pencilled in numbers for each section and an idea of how much they are willing to "give" on each. A forceful supervisor or a forceful assessor could probably wield 60% of the "power" in such a meeting, but that isn't the point.

I don't know what discipline you are in but in CS there has been a lot of work on project marking and project management lately - if you contact your LTSN subject centre they may have some documentation, or a mailing list, which would enable to you ask the question in a more discipline-specific fashion and across institutions. I know it's the sort of question that the ICS-LTSN list would happily address. They take questions to the mailing list and compile the answers into a useful FAQ.
posted by handee at 1:28 AM on August 15, 2006

A related question from the aforementioned FAQ about MSc project supervision and marking - doesn't answer your question exactly, but might be interesting reading anyway...
posted by handee at 1:29 AM on August 15, 2006