What do I have to do to get the grade? How examination standards interact with learning, teaching and the curriculum

Journal article

Communicating national qualification standards clearly to learners and their teachers is crucial to raising standards. If people do not know what they must do to get the grade, then the qualification is providing poor information about what is considered valuable learning. Assessment scores (and grades) need to convey meaning about learners’ knowledge and skills. Yet score meaning is obscure, which leads to frustration on the part of teachers and learners. How standards are conceived, and set, interacts with score meaning. In this article, we outline how the current system of setting standards for GCSEs and A-levels in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - attainment-referencing - affects the clarity of grading standards. Attainment-referencing offers no single artefact to represent standards, as it is the product of an amalgam of evidence. This makes it difficult for learners and their teachers to derive score meaning from their assessment outcomes. We contrast this with other methods for setting and maintaining standards that have been suggested as better alternatives: norm- and criterionreferencing. Both, in their own ways, purport to offer greater clarity. However, norm-referencing does not relate directly to curriculum standards, but to learners’ ranks with respect to a population. Criterion-referencing relates directly to the curriculum but operates better in theory than in practice - criteria can never be specified unproblematically because of the limits of language. Within the context of how standards are currently set and maintained, attainment-referencing, we suggest ways of better explaining the curriculum-related meaning of national qualification grades.

Authors: Meadows, M; Cadwallader, S; Gray, L; Baird, J-A

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Review of Education
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 3
• Article number: e70126
• Publication date: 2025-12-19
• Acceptance date: 2025-12-03
• DOI: 10.1002/rev3.70126
• EISSN: 2049-6613
• ISSN: 2049-6613
• Language: English
• Keywords: norm-referencing; criterion-referencing; attainment-referencing; score meaning