Assessment in Higher Education: The Potential for a Community of Practice to Improve Inter-marker Reliability

Ian P. Herbert, John Joyce and Trevor Hassall

Accounting Education, 2014, vol. 23, issue 6, 542-561

Abstract: The design, delivery and assessment of a complete educational scheme, such as a degree programme or a professional qualification course, is a complex matter. Maintaining alignment between the stated aims of the curriculum and the scoring of student achievement is an overarching concern. The potential for drift across individual aspects of an educational scheme (teaching, learning and assessment), together with emerging criticism in extant literature of the reliability of marking processes, suggests that, in practice, maintaining alignment might be more difficult than had previously been assumed.In this paper, the concept of a Community of Practice (CoP) is employed as an analytical lens through which the notion of a markers' standardisation meeting that focuses on maintaining alignment between the curriculum, the marking scheme and the scoring of student scripts can be critically examined. Given that the aims and subject content of management learning are both multidimensional and contextual, such meetings have the potential to develop a shared approach to the elaboration and application of the marking scheme. A further role of the CoP is in the calibration of markers to accommodate further variations in student responses as they arise in the actual marking process. In this respect, the CoP has both descriptive and prescriptive potential in terms of aiding the development of markers of professional accounting examinations and also, we suggest, within accounting education more generally.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09639284.2014.974195 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:accted:v:23:y:2014:i:6:p:542-561

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAED20

DOI: 10.1080/09639284.2014.974195

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting Education is currently edited by Richard Wilson

More articles in Accounting Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().