Hard to fail

She thinks that for some courses, 'it is impossible to fail' because the breakdown of the marks allocated would easily allow an average student to pass; such as awarding 5% for attendance, 10% for participation and marks for appearance.

She recalls the time she refused to pass a matriculation student who handed in a torn fullscap paper scrawled with some sentences for his essay assignment for her compulsory module. The university passed him on her behalf.

There was also another hilarious occasion where the students were required to answer an exam question 'give reasons to your cousin why he should join this course', in order to test their critical thinking skills.

'We expected them to write things like 'it opens your mind', 'you will gain new experiences' and so forth.

'But instead, they wrote 'you will get money from the government and you can buy yourself a motorcycle, it's a guaranteed pass here, so don't worry, and later you can work for the government or if you can't get a job, you can come back here and lecture at this university'.'

The Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) says that in its accreditation processes, they look into student assessment systems, even reading samples of student papers to ensure the marking is fair and follows the scheme.

'It's quite common around the world to use the bell curve as a guide,' says MQA chief executive officer Prof Datuk Dr Syed Ahmad Hussein. 'Usually a small group of people would do well, most would be average and some will fail.'

He says in situations where every student gets an 'F' or and 'A', the 'alarm bells' should ring and this would usually call for an investigation by the university senate on why this is so.

'The university senate has the authority to do this because there are many possibilities - maybe the exam was too easy or hard, maybe the question papers were leaked, or the lecturer was not fair,' he explains.

Varsity can rectify

Should such situations occur, the university is allowed to make rectifications like asking students to re-sit exams, scale the grade brackets upward or downward, or making changes to the student assessment system.

'If the senate decides to, say, add 10 marks across the board, it is allowed for and it is legal,' he says.

Prof Syed Ahmad doesn't deny cases where people have complained about standards or non-consistent marking schemes, but he thinks these are isolated cases and not a trend.

He is sceptical of claims that the standards have deteriorated as opposed to 'back then'.

There are 100,000 graduates a year these days compared to the 70s, he says, which means that the number of both half-baked graduates and competent graduates would rise as well.

So far, Dr Syed Ahmad reveals that MQA has not received any complaints of conspiracies to pass students.

At the end of the day, he feels that consumers are the best judges of quality.

'After a while, people will start to say that graduates from this college or university don't get employed, then word will go round and the college will die.'

Public universities such as Universiti Malaya (UM), use the bell curve as a guide, although UM's examination section (academic division) senior principal assistant registrar Yeoh Siew Wan says it's not necessary for all courses.

Depending on programmes, UM (like most universities) awards marks to students in a continuous assessment framework which includes not only written examinations but also presentations, quizzes, assignments, fieldwork and projects.

The university's quality management and enhancement centre's director Prof Dr Fauza Abdul Ghaffar says UM has in place certain quality management procedures such as internal and external audits, submitting papers to external examiners for input, and vetting the examination papers and marking schemes before students sit for them.

Lecturer's discretion

Yeoh reveals that the way a lecturer awards marks, however, is left to the discretion of the lecturer.

'The lecturer knows best how to give marks to the students because he or she taught them,' she says, adding that there are strict guidelines and the decision to give extra marks to a student is the committee's decision, not the lecturer's.

The same system is practised in Multimedia University, where IT lecturer John See says though the university has the auditing or vetting processes in place, the department heads would not have time to look through or sample the answer sheets, so the lecturers would have to be 'responsible'.

'It's up to the lecturers to set a hard or easy paper, and no one would say much,' he says, adding that there used to be a stricter guideline of what was deemed a 'normal' rate of passing and perhaps lecturers were fearful of failing students to adhere to the bell curve, but MMU does not practise that anymore.

'We felt we had to maintain our standards, regardless whether students are lousy or not.'

In UM, there are chances for students to appeal for their paper to be re-marked and also to 'redeem' themselves upon failing a subject, if their past performance has been good.

'The lecturer can set him a test, an assignment or interview him - but he can only redeem one subject if he has failed a few,' says Yeoh.

International Medical University (IMU) and Monash University Sunway Campus (Monash) do not use the bell-curve guide but rather, criteria referencing - which assesses a student based on criteria, rather than on the performance of the overall student body.

IMU Faculty of Medicine and Health executive dean Prof Victor K E Lim simply describes it as 'if everybody meets the outcome, everybody must pass, but if nobody meets the outcome, everybody must fail!'

He believes the bell-curve guide is not suitable for professional courses like medicine which needs to judge expertise, but is more appropriate for entrance exams where many types of students are taken into account.

To maintain the exam standards across the years, IMU question papers undergo double vetting by lecturers and deans, before being sent to an external examiner for corrections.

After the students sit for the exams, the answers also undergo double marking before sample answer sheets with high, low and average marks are sent to the external examiner to check for marking consistency.

'We don't really find ways to pass a student,' Prof Lim says. 'If they want, they can re-sit the exam.'

And to ensure a student is rightly assessed in other areas such as practicals and interaction with patients, they are assessed by multiple lecturers and staff, rather than just one person.

Monash has rigorous vetting and sampling processes, as director of education quality and innovation Dr Glenda Crosling believes that the event of having to scale the grades up or down according to a paper's level of difficulty shouldn't happen after students sit for the exams.

'I think the paper should be set at the right level beforehand to prevent that from occurring,' she says. 'And marks shouldn't be adjusted just because there are many who fail.'

But if there are unusual trends, the chief examiner would have to explain to the board of examiners why this occurs.

Student assessment obviously does not depend solely on examinations, as assignments and projects play a big role.