Teachers best placed to judge their students' performance
I refer to Philip Yeung's comments on school-based assessment (SBA) in his article ("Behind the exam results: a system that's driving students to defection", July 16).
SBA has been incorporated into the public assessment of 12 Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) subjects. Students are assessed by their subject teachers and marks count towards the examination results. SBA makes the assessment more comprehensive as different modes of SBA can assess those learning outcomes in the curriculums that cannot be assessed by conventional written exams.
The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority has confidence in teachers' ability to conduct SBA as they are best placed to judge their students' performance. In consultation with their colleagues, they can reliably assess the performance of all students within the school in a given subject. However, they are not necessarily aware of the standards of performance across all schools in Hong Kong.
Teachers in one school may be harsher or more lenient in their judgments than teachers in other schools and may use different mark ranges. To ensure the fairness and reliability of the SBA results and the comparability of SBA scores across schools, the authority, in accordance with best international practice, makes use of appropriate methods to moderate the raw scores submitted by different schools. During the moderation process, careful consideration is given to statistical data and samples of student work.
If necessary, SBA marks are adjusted to iron out discrepancies due to teachers' strictness or leniency but the rank order of students as determined by the school will remain unchanged. This means that students who have done well in their SBA will still benefit from their good SBA performance regardless of their performance in public examinations.