How much disagreement should there be?
Thousands of school students are being awarded the wrong NCEA grades, a review of last year’s results has revealed.
Nearly one in four grades given by teachers for internally marked work were deemed incorrect after checking by New Zealand Qualifications Authority moderators.
That’s not actually true, because moderators don’t deem grades to be incorrect. That’s not what moderators are for. What the report says (pp105-107 in case you want to scroll through it) is that in 24% of cases the moderator and the internal assessor disagreed on grade, and in 12% they disagreed on whether the standard had been achieved.
What we don’t know is how much disagreement is appropriate. The only way the moderator’s assessment could be considered error-free is if you define the ‘right answer’ to be ‘whatever the moderator says’, which is obviously not appropriate. There always will be some variation between moderators, and some variation between schools, and what we want to know is whether there is too much.
The report is a bit disappointing from that point of view. At the very least, there should have been some duplicate moderation. That is, some pieces of work should have been sent to two different moderators, so we could have an idea of the between-moderator agreement rate. Then, if we were willing to assume that moderators collectively were infallible (though not individually), we could estimate how much less reliable the internal assessments were.
Even better would be to get some information on how much variation there is between schools in the disagreement: if there is very little variation, the schools may be doing about as well as is possible, but if there is a lot of variation between schools it would suggest some schools aren’t assessing very reliably.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The government is putting pressure on schools to have 85% of kids pass NCEA level 2 (IIRC). The problem is that one way to do that is by relaxing the standards. It would be interesting to know if the moderator was marking in one direction more than the other e.g. always grading lower rather than higher.
11 years ago