THE IMPACT OF PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF COMMERCE AND MANAGEMENT DEGREE PROGRAMMES USING CUMULATIVE GRADE POINT AVERAGE METHOD

Abstract

The common credit and qualification framework for Sri Lankan University system proposed by the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Council is to maintain the consistency and comparability of university level qualifications, and to promote student mobility by creating more flexible arrangements for students learning. This method is based on Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of marks obtained by students. To minimize drastic variations, all degree programmes were categorized into six and a separate framework has been developed for each. Considering the complexity associated with handling data, this study only focuses the framework developed for Commerce and Management degree programmes. The negative impact of the CGPA method on performance evaluation, especially in determining class or pass of the degree, is investigated and analysed through this research. This study also makes important suggestions to overcome the drawbacks of the new method. This study is based on statistically generated data due to practical impossibility of obtaining actual results data which are highly confidential. Therefore, marks of students are generated from a multivariate normal distribution to accommodate the correlation and normality of marks of a single student. Marks of thousand students for fourty subjects are generated using MINITAB 14 and converted into grade points. Final results (class/pass) intended under both CGPA (new) and final average (old) methods are then cross-tabulated and compared. The research discovers that the proposed method of evaluation is inefficient, as it always underestimates performance of students, relative to the existing method. Through an in-depth analysis of intended results under both methods, cutoff marks for the CGPA method were redefined for Commerce and Management degree programmes, so that it will not make any significant deviation from the existing method of determining class/pass of students.