Using Professional Judgement To Equate Exam Standards

The principal concern in the UK is with maintaining standards that already exist, rather than with setting a new standard. To ensure standards are kept ‘constant’ is essentially a process of comparison rather than measurement. In this chapter four examples are presented to show how Thurstone’s method of comparative judgement can be used to maintain standards, especially in the more ‘difficult’ cases involving extended writing, performances, or other complex activities. In particular, it describes how analysis of the residuals from fitting Rasch parameters to the data can be used to monitor the quality of the equating procedure.