2008/03/29 by Mathieu Bouville, Bouville, Mathieu
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Engineering Education and Curriculum Development #FOS: Physical sciences #General Physics (physics.gen-ph) #Physics Education (physics.ed-ph) #physics.ed-ph #physics.gen-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0803.4235
5 pages
arxiv created 2008/03/29 · openalex publication_date 2008/03/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2024/04/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is widely agreed that exams must be fair; yet what this exactly means is not made clear. One may mean fairness of treatment, but this merely propagates the fairness or unfairness of pre-existing rules. Fairness of opportunity on the other hand necessarily leads to identical grades for everyone, which clearly makes it inapplicable. Neither view is helpful to make decisions on competing claims: fairness of treatment ignores the problem and fairness of opportunity holds all claims to be equally valid. To escape this deadlock one needs an external criterion to replace fairness viewed as student-student comparison. Keywords: assessment; bias; engineering education; examinations; grading; justice; tests