Improving fairness on students’ overall marks via dynamic reselection of assessors

A fundamental subject delivered at the tertiary level could have a cohort of several hundreds of students distributed into multiple campuses. The running of such a unit typically calls for a teaching team of which a major task is to fairly mark all students’ various assessment items. It is well observed that a given assessment is likely to receive different marks if it is given to different markers, often regardless of how detailed the marking criteria are, especially when the content is of subjective or opinion based nature. In this work, we propose an effective strategy to improve the fairness on the students’ overall marks by accepting that markers may have inherent marking leniency of different magnitude and by dynamically reselecting markers for different groups of students in such a way that the students will eventually share a similar amount of marking leniency in their overall marks. This strategy is completely objective, purely based on the markers’ previous marking statistics, and is independent of the design and interpretation of the marking criteria.