Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the Effect of adjusting cut scores across the years on grading categories of Malawi School Certificate Education Examination (MSCE) Mathematics paper I. The study was conducted in view of the need for comparability of standards across different administrations to ensure consistency in examination results and enhancement of public confidence in high stakes examinations such as the MSCE. It sought to find out how scores from different annual administrations hence different standard setting processes of the test relate to each other and to investigate the effect of changing the cut scores from one cohort to another on the grading categories. The study made use of quantitative data obtained from the three test (2005, 2006 and 2007) forms that were administered on equivalent groups of a sample of year 2012 form four (grade 12) students. It was found that pupils who wrote the 2005 and 2007 forms of the test performed significantly better than those who sat for the 2006 version, an indication that the 2006 form was more difficult than the 2005 and 2007 forms. The findings of the study, therefore supports the view that despite the best effort efforts by test developers to match the content and difficulty level of the forms across cohorts, it is impossible to construct strictly parallel forms of the test. This, then, suggest that it is fair to have different cut scores on different test forms since these forms are different in difficulty despite being similar in content.

More details

School	: School of Education
Issued Date	: 2015

Download full document