Abstract:
Evaluation and grading of students vary significantly across Higher Education
Institutes (HEIs) based on several aspects adopted by HEIs. These aspects may
include different students’ evaluations as employed across several disciplines
including Arts, Sciences and Commerce. This case-based study examines the Student
Evaluation methods of Arts faculties of 15 public Higher Education Institutes (HEIs),
their differing criteria are compared, and then also contrasted to find weaknesses
and errors frequently found in the manual evaluation. Further, the Faculty of Social
Sciences and Languages at Sabaragamuwa University epitomizes complexity in
evaluation, grading and assessment in students’ evaluation in hard sciences. Mark
sheets created manually can result in human errors as they must focus on various
combinations at the same time and the combination of criteria. This research suggests
a digitalized mark sheet. Digitalized mark sheets would alleviate human errors, allow
for more accuracy and efficiency, as well as helping students who may suffer from
erroneous manual evaluation processes. Moreover, it would also allow statistical
analysis to produce the necessary summary reports by multiple authorities on
grading and results. The digitalized mark sheet would also mean students could
access their results online at different times, and multiple manual data entries into
mark sheets would not be necessary
