Involving supervisors in assessing undergraduate student projects: is double marking robust?

Abstract

The individual student project is a significant piece of work, typically carried out in the final or penultimate year of an engineering programme. Its primary aim is to provide evidence of a student’s competence in applying the knowledge and experience gained over the entire engineering programme to practical engineering problem solving. Each student project is supervised by at least one academic. In many institutions, double marking involving project supervisors and non-supervisors is used to provide a summative assessment of student projects. This has raised concerns about potential supervisor bias. The work reported in this paper is a statistical investigation into potential supervisor bias in a double marking scheme in the engineering department of a UK university. In this scheme, 90 final year undergraduate engineering student projects were assessed by 24 supervisors and 20 non-supervisors (referred to in this paper as second markers). The findings from this analysis suggest that there is significant correlation between the marks awarded by project supervisors and second markers and that there is no statistically significant evidence to suggest that project supervisors mark and grade final year student projects differently from second markers. An analysis of the project assessment environment from a community of practice perspective leads to the conclusion that the practice of double marking, as widely applied in engineering project assessment, probably has sufficient feedback and control mechanisms to ensure minimal intermarker variability between project supervisors and second markers.