ENHANCING SMART STUDENT EVALUATION WITH RULES AND RESPONSIBILITY: A CASE STUDY ON FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENTS

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