Fairness in Assessment

Since this is an extremely broad topic to discuss, I'm going to pose the question: is assessing students the same way always fair? In my previous blog, I stated that I felt it was unfair to assess students only through testing and also mentioned that using a rubric was a great way to assess student work. However, is it fair to assess every child the same way? Teachers are encouraged to use multiple intelligences because students have different learning styles, why not assess following the same guidelines? If every student learns differently then they should also be assessed differently.

It is very easy for a teacher to utilize a rubric in order to grade student work with the notion that is is the "fair" way. Although the teacher may be using a rubric, there is still room to tweak the student's grade based on personal feelings or knowledge they may have about the student.

The paragraph below is taken from a website: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~smx/PGCHE/fairness.html

For instance while we may wish to penalise a native English speaker for bad use of grammar we may wish to be considerably more lenient when it comes to an essay written by a non-native English speaker - especially if we are more interested in whether the student as assimilated the material upon which the essay is based than in their ability to write good English. A person can use some discretion in detecting the background of the student and applying a mark scheme accordingly which, at present, is beyond the scope of automated methods.