Calibration of Marks

Calibration is a systematic numerical adjustment of marks to ensure that they map onto the School's marking scale.

This happens regularly in the School of English, especially in English Language & Linguistics due to the more common occurrence of right/wrong type questions, but occasionally in other programmes as well.

Assessments in the School of English are diverse, and are used to test different abilities, both across programmes and modules, but also within specific modules; so, for example, a multiple choice test (which might be responded to error-free) is clearly assessing different things than a discursive essay (which, for example, better assesses originality). Assessing different types of knowledge and skills is an important part of our pedagogy. Equally, it is important that the marks for all assessments are treated with parity to ensure that students are never disadvantaged in one assessment type in comparison to another type. Calibration of raw marks for some assessments is essential in accomplishing this parity, within the School of English and across the University.

All members of staff in the School who need to calibrate raw marks use the same calibration equation, which uses a high and low reference mark and then places all the raw marks in between those reference numbers along a scale. In most cases this will mean that scoring a perfect score in terms of the raw marks will not equate to a final, calibrated mark of 100. The reference marks are assigned by the module convener, and are made with reference to the descriptors in the School's marking scale (i.e. the multi-colored markscale) and how that relates to the tasks involved and what types of abilities are being assessed. All calibrated marks are also subject to our normal moderation procedures.