GRADING EXAMS – MORE THAN JUST A NUMBER

In recent years much has been done, especially by the Bologna process, to ensure that academic education is kept at a high level around the globe. One of the main issues addressed is the importance of learning outcomes. In this manuscript the author focuses on two subjects directly related to learning outcomes and suggest a new view on how to grade courses. The first subject is how learning outcomes of one course are affected by those of its predecessor. Suppose several subjects are taught in one course, e.g., in the course "Electronic Communication Systems" both analog and digital systems are presented. This course is followed by the course "Advances in Digital Communications". Obviously if a student did well in the "digital" part of "Electronic Communication Systems" he should be eligible to take the advanced course, however if he did not succeed in the analog part he might have failed the course, and consequently could not take the advanced course prior to passing the initial course. The paper suggests that although the grade of a course must be unique, its components may be used separately to obtain pre-requisitions for different courses. The second subject is the grading criteria. In most cases final exams are graded by question and by section, e.g., question no. 1 is worth 30 points, its first section is worth 10 points, and the student will lose 2 points if the final result is not accurate. In this work the author presents a new approach of grading by subject. In the suggested approach the grades are not given per question and per section but cover the entire exam. E.g., "Expressing Knowledge in Physics" is worth 20 points, "Ability to analyze Systems" is worth 15 points, "Clearness of Explanations" is worth 10 points etc. Each of these subjects is observed in the full context of the exam and not for each question separately. This way the learning outcomes are easier to extract. Finally, the author tests the two suggestions for recently taught courses, to demonstrate their validity.