• Discuss advantages of using grades in place of marks.
• Differentiate between relative and absolute grading.
• Use grades in your day to day work.

The convention in most examinations has been to allot a maximum of 100 marks to a question paper and then award marks to each student based on his performance. Thus we create 101 points (0 to 100) and try to mark the student with the precision that is never attainable. Often, there are examiners, who would make even a further finer subdivision and allot say 57 1/2 or 60 3/4 marks to a student ! Research on marking patterns ahs shown a variation ranging between 10 - 35% among different examiners or even in case of same examiners when remarking the script after a certain interval of time. In other words, it means that 3 student who obtain 55,60 and 65 marks may be in the same band of achievement. What then, is the rationale for awarding 57 1/2 marks ?

There is another common tendency among examiners to cluster their marks around the pass marks. If pass marks are 35, many students will receive 35 marks. : If pass marks are fixed at 50, the cluster of students receiving 50 marks will increase. Further in certain subjects, a student can get very high marks, while in others, the maximum obtained by a student may never exceed say 70. Thus, we tend to shrink or expand the scale depending on the subject matter. These factors make the true comparison of students' abilities difficult. The problem is further compounded when comparisons have to be made between colleges or universities.

One of the ways to overcome this problem is to change from marks to grades. In the subsequent discussion, we will try to tell you about mechanics of grading. There is a great flexibility in the number of grades that one can adopt - from 3 to 11. While adopting a 3 - point scale may not truly differentiate between students of different abilities, a 11 point scale may make distinctions too fine and introduce arbitrariness. UGC has suggested a 7 point grading scheme as being satisfactory. This has the advantage of being applicable to different subjects.

The 7 points of the grading scale are designated as follows : -

You may be wondering that this type of classification is again arbitrary and biased - in fact it is not. A student is awarded one of these grades based on a scientific method. How is it actually done ?

Grading can be either absolute or relative. When we grade a student based on his performance alone, we call it absolute grading. Dome people also call it criterion referenced grading. On the other hand, when we grade him in comparison to performance of other students, it is called relative grading or norm referenced grading.

For adopting absolute grading, the following procedure can be adopted. The marks obtained by the students during previous 3 years are compiled and arranged as follows, after emperically determining the cut - off points. One such distribution can be :

Thus, grades as indicated can be assigned depending on the range in which marks of the candidate fall. In this type of distribution, possibly all candidates can get 'O' or all of them could get 'F'. A student obtaining at least 'C' is considered pass. For obtaining overall grades of a student, the points obtained by him in all the subjects are added and a grade point average is calculated. For example, a student A in Anatomy. O in Physiology and B in Biochemistry. His grade point average will be :

The process of relative grading is slightly different. Here statistical methods are employed to obtain a distribution of various grades in a given student population. The distribution for a 7 point scale has been worked out as follows :

In this method, top 3% of the students will get 0 grade, next 7% will get A grade and so on. This method compares performance of one student against the other. As you would appreciate, relative grading will be more useful for selection type of tests while for certifying examinations and class tests, obsolute grading will be more useful.

Whichever method you may decide to adopt, the grading can be done directly or the students are first assigned marks, which are later converted to grades as per the scheme given above. Direct grading is specially useful for practical and laboratory work.

Grading makes only 7 divisions to which a student's performance can be assigned as compared to 101 division adopted by conventional marking. Thus, chances of error are considerably minimised. Examiners have been found to be more consistent in awarding grades than they have been in awarding marks. Comparability of performance over different subject areas and different colleges is more likely to be possible with grades than with marks.