An Analysis of Shared Grading in Co-Assessment Practices by Teachers and Students

Abstract

Current trends in educational assessment in different branches of higher education share the common goal of uniting learning with assessment.  Most approaches and theoretical and practical developments in this field revolve around four main factors: feedback, democratization, alignment and relevance. This paper proposes the use of co-assessment as a means of ensuring dialogue-based, democratic and fairer evaluations. With co-assessment, the responsibility is shared by the teacher and the students, who negotiate and agree on the appraisal of student tasks and, in this paper, also on the awarded mark. The aim of this study is to analyse the relationship between a series of jointly agreed marks, following the co-assessment of four tasks, and the marks that the teachers and students would each have individually awarded. Two teachers and 100 students participated in the study, which follows a correlational design and analyses significant statistical differences. The results show a strong correlation between the jointly agreed marks and those assigned individually by the teacher, even though statistically significant differences were found between them. Conversely, no statistically significant differences were identified between the joint marks and the marks assigned individually by the students.  These results call for reflection on the real possibility of adapting shared grading methods to students in university frameworks, where the repercussions of awarded marks go far beyond formative goals.