Our nation's colleges and universities frequently adapt their approach to education in response to the reality of social, economic and environmental challenges. Today the reality is that we are increasingly interconnected on a global scale. This new era of globalization impacts every facet of society, and it offers both an exciting blend of…

Rankings and online comparison sites have both facilitated and shaped the marketisation of higher education in England, the UK as a whole and elsewhere. They have facilitated marketisation by introducing greater competition between and within higher education institutions. Ultimately, they accomplish the transformation of qualities into…

U.S. higher education institutions are being called to question their central nature, priorities, and functions, with prominent and unprecedented attention being given to accountability and the measurement of student learning outcomes. As higher education evolves in how it assesses student learning and leisure studies and recreation departments…

Fuzzy logic, which is based on fuzzy sets theory introduced by Zadeh in 1965, provides a rich and meaningful addition to standard logic. The applications which may be generated from or adapted to fuzzy logic are wide-ranging and provide the opportunity for modeling under conditions which are imprecisely defined. In this article we develop a fuzzy…

Recent developments in OER and MOOCs (Open Educational Resources and Massive Open Online Courses) have raised questions as to how learners engaging with these courses and components might be assessed or credentialed. This descriptive and exploratory paper examines PLAR (Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition) as a possible answer to these…

The authors develop an original measure of learning in higher education, based on grades in subsequent courses. Using this measure of learning, they show that student evaluations are positively related to current grades but unrelated to learning once current grades are controlled. They offer evidence that the weak relationship between learning and…

This paper reports on the perceptions of teaching economists of the nature, implementation and result of outcomes assessment/assurance of learning (AOL) in higher education. The results reported in the paper are based on over eight hundred responses to a web-based survey of teaching economists. While there is little consensus among economists…

Decisions by markers about quality in student work remain confusing to most students and markers. This may in part be due to the relatively subjective nature of what constitutes a quality response to an assessment task. This paper reports on an experiment that documented the process of decision-making by multiple markers at a university who…

This paper is a polemical discussion of assessment in teacher education. Working from the proposition that assessment serves a number of important purposes for a range of stakeholders (students, employers, quality assurance agencies, government), it argues that there is considerable potential for conflict between the different purposes. In an age…

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University implemented a pass-fail grading system two years ago. The procedure in use appears to be working smoothly and suffers little abuse. Aside from physical education, courses taught under this system primarily are taken by seniors. The number of courses elected for pass-fail grading is small: 3.3…

Reactions to a marking system proposed by Scott are offered and inconsistencies identified. It is suggested that Scott's system does not minimize any of the difficulties usually apparent in absolute systems and presents some new problems. (LBH)

Students' assessments of one type of learning product, the term paper, were examined. The basic question underlying the project was whether students enrolled in college courses would be less adequate at assigning grades and ranks to their classmates' papers than would the instructors. A case is made for classmate evaluation. (LBH)

Grades generated by self-evaluation of performance were often more generous than those generated by instructor evaluation. (JD)