David K's personal thoughts
about
MARKING FOR MID-SWEDEN
UNIVERSITY
STANDARDS
There's no formal
policy about standards, but I can see three possibilities:
- "Top mark = perfection" - and of course no-one ever
will get that, which is frustrating for everyone:
- You can say "Top mark = the best that someone working at
this level can be expected to do": then people who are "over
the top" will get the same mark as people who are "good enough" -
it was this thinking which led to the idea of giving only two or
three marks (fail, pass, exceptional), which I learnt as normal in
Sweden in the 1970s:
- "Top mark is the best work done on that course": this
is the traditional English school system, and tends to produce a
constant increase in standards as time goes on, at the price of a
horrible feeling of competition.
My aim is to use model no.2: but since it seems impossible to
specify objectively what it's reasonable to expect, in practice no.3
exerts an influence, too. Marks of 9 and 10 are certainly possible.
If you should ever get a low mark, you can always improve it if
you want to write another version, using the comments you were given:
and if ever you suspect me of being unfair, let me know and I'll ask
one of the students who got a high mark if I can send you their task
to compare. We can also get an opinion from another tutor.
