To avoid grade inflation and maintain academic standards, assessments should be designed to be sufficiently academically challenging and of a varied nature to allow differentiation of student performance in achieving course intended learning outcomes (ILOs).
The following incorporates good practice at HKUST, which has benefited from benchmarking with sister institutions in Hong Kong and with international best practices. HKUST(GZ) would adopt the same practice.
GOOD PRACTICES
Faculty are encouraged to adopt the following Good Practices, details of which are provided below:
- Use a variety of methods to assess the achievement of course ILOs.
- Design assessments that require students to apply, analyze, evaluate and synthesize information rather than recall facts or concepts which could be easily reproduced from websites or other sources.
- Coordinate among faculty to manage the number, timing, and type of assessments required of students for the Term, to ensure that students are not over-assessed or over-burdened.
- Maintain a bank of questions related to your courses, for each assessment method.
- Make samples of past examination papers available to students, to inform and direct their learning.
- Review grade distributions annually in regard to historical distributions for their courses (and for Level 1000-4000 courses with reference to HKUST’s Guideline Grade Distribution bands), to avoid grade inflation and monitor the academic standards of assessments and the marking/grading criteria applied.
- The unit responsible for offering undergraduate courses arranges a session to review the semester's course grading before grades are submitted to the Academic Registry Services.
POOR PRACTICES
- DO NOT use norm-referencing, i.e. DO NOT grade students to a curve, with reference to their peers;
- DO NOT use just one method to assess a course, e.g. DO NOT rely solely on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) or short answer questions (SAQs).
- DO NOT use the same, or a large proportion of the same, questions as used in previous examinations.
30 Aug 2024