Criteria Referenced Marking of Written Assignments

The paper discusses the marking of written assignment and reports the results of the first step of an action research project conducted at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Lecturers marked students' written assignments first without an espoused criteria and the second time using a criteria referenced assessment form. The two sets of marks are compared and correlation and agreement between the scores are presented. The results show that the range of the marks is greater and the distribution of the marks is closer to the normal distribution when the assessment form was used. The difference between the two sets of marks was statistically significant (p < 0.05) though the correlation of the scores was good (r = 0.84). The paper discusses possible reasons for the results and also looks at individual students' marks.