Project description

Certainty Based Marking (CBM) is an assessment method where students not only have to answer a question but they also have to indicate how certain they are that their answer is correct. Depending on the combination of the correctness of the answer and the certainty given, a student can get a range of positive and negative marks for each question. This type of assessment encourages reflection on one’s answers and awards more points for thoughtful correct answers than for lucky uncertain guesses. Moreover, CBM is very useful for the settings when the tests are taken in a non-controlled environment, or example on-line, since students are less likely to copy answers if they know it can result in a worse mark than simply not answering a question.

CBM is traditionally used for closed questions so is not suitable for all types of assessments and subjects. This project aims to investigate how the ideas from CBM can be extended to open test/exam questions and to create a framework for easy and consistent use of CBM for a range of assessment types and subjects.

Duties and responsibilities

1. Research literature and analyse case studies on implementations of CBM.
2. Analyse and understand why CBM is so successful in encouraging reflection and preventing cheating on tests with closed type of questions.
3. Suggest how similar results could be obtained for open questions.
4. Suggest a framework that could be shared with a wider teaching community on the implementation of CBM for open questions.

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