Teaching and evaluation are the two most important components in education. After teaching comes evaluation and after evaluation comes teaching. The two activities are replete with responsibility towards students.
A principal conducted an experiment during an English teachers’ workshop in Mumbai. He distributed copies of a short essay and asked the participants to evaluate it. One teacher awarded it 70%, another 50%, and a third 40%. The implications of this are startling.
Marks can make or mar a student’s future and even affect them emotionally. The responsibility of evaluation is most intense while assessing descriptive subjects, but is not entirely absent from other subjects, such as the Sciences and Maths.
The primary question is: what do we examine a student for? Most teachers think they evaluate their students for the knowledge gained over a period. However, Norman E. Gronlund and Robert L. Linn, authors of Measurement and Evaluation in Teaching(1990), say that evaluation is much more. It is “a systematic process of collecting and analysing and interpretation to determine the extent to which pupils’ achievement objectives” have been realised.
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Their definition emphasises evaluation not as a simplistic act dictated by impressions, but as an organised, multi-layered process comprising multiple activities of collecting, analysing, and interpreting knowledge. These levels mean going upward in both teaching and learning measurement.
To evaluate an essay, teachers must not only collect information by looking at the student’s knowledge (content) but also measure their ability to knit the different parts (introduction, body, conclusion) together cohesively, display their skill in language and interpret the topic from a fresh angle.
Teachers may follow the three steps subconsciously, but unless objectivity is built into each level through specific marks allocated in advance in a model answer, they are likely to be carried away by a student’s performance in any one aspect. A student with superior language skills can sway a teacher’s sentiments and get a better grade than others whose content and ideas may be more original but command over language may be weak.
Predefined scores
Management describes this phenomenon as the ‘halo effect,’ where one quality gets privilege over others during appraisal. To avoid this flaw, the evaluator must decide in advance the marks they are going to assign to the different components.
For example, apportioning X marks if language is excellent, Y if it is average, and Z if it is below average, or a range is one option. Additionally, they could specify excellence as the absence of grammatical mistakes and misspellings, and apt use of vocabulary. The teacher must similarly define average and below-average performance levels for content, cohesiveness, and originality. Though this seems tedious, the system is transparent and makes evaluation scientific and easier, as it transits from one level of achievement to the next.
The marking plan, if shared with the students while teaching them to write the essay, will enable them to grade their own work. The idea is to leave nothing to ambiguity because evaluation assesses learning, and is not meant to revel in mystique or power. A non-subjective and detailed scheme of evaluation can apply to all subjects — numerical and descriptive, as often part marks have to be awarded when students miss steps in writing the proof of a theorem or experiment.
To sum up, evaluation is an index of a student’s learning and not an end. Students should know where they have gone astray and be able to correct themselves. Multi-level evaluation is more than marks because marks alone do not tell us how good a student is in the subject or how much they have learnt. A precise system of evaluation helps place an uncontestable value on the level of their achievement.
The writer is former professor of English at IIT Bombay. ceogiit@gmail.com
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