Are some students graded more appropriately than others? Student characteristics as moderators of the relationships between teacher-assigned grades and test scores in mathematics

Teacher-assigned grades and external exams: sources of discrepancy

Modest correlations between teacher-assigned grades and external assessments of academic achievement (r = .40-.60) have led many educational stakeholders to deem grades subjective and unreliable. However, theoretical and methodological challenges, such as construct misalignment, data unavailability and sample unrepresentativeness, limit the generalisability of previous findings. We overcome these challenges by exploiting rich, population-wide data from the National Registries in Norway (n = 511,858), where state regulations require close construct alignment between grades and external exams. Correlations between lower-secondary education final grades and external exam results (r = .64-.86) suggest that grades are better measures of academic achievement than previously acknowledged. Dominance analyses and multivariate regression analyses indicate that external exam results are the best predictor of grades in the same subject. However, our results also indicate that state regulations and quality assurance systems cannot completely eradicate potential sources of discrepancy.

Disentangling the Association Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Student Achievement: Meta-Analytic Evidence on the Role of Domain Specificity and Achievement Measures

Students’ academic achievement is a central predictor of a long list of important educational outcomes, such as access to higher education and socioeconomic success. Prior studies have extensively focused on identifying variables that are related to academic achievement and an important variable in this context appears to be students’ personality. Notably, although findings from more recent studies suggested that the association between student achievement and personality varies by the subject domain (language vs. STEM) and the type of achievement measure (grades vs. test scores), systematic meta-analytical evidence is still lacking. To address this gap in the educational research literature, we conducted a meta-analysis based on 78 studies, with 1491 effect sizes representing data from 500,218 students and 110 samples from elementary to high school. We used a random-effects model with robust variance estimation to calculate mean effect sizes and standard deviations. We found moderating effects of measure or domain for all five personality traits, with differences in the direction of the effects. Our results highlight the importance of the domain and measure when examining how personality traits relate to academic achievement in school. The combination of subject domain and achievement was also found to be relevant for some of the traits. These findings emphasize that subject domains and types of achievement measures should be explicitly considered when investigating the personality saturation of student achievement. We discuss implications for future research, highlighting that there is no “best” or “more objective” achievement measure but, instead, that achievement measures should be chosen based on the research question of interest.

Unraveling the Relationship Between Teacher-Assigned Grades, Student Personality, and Standardized Test Scores

The Big Five personality traits play a major role in student achievement. As such, there is consistent evidence that students that are more conscientious receive better teacher-assigned grades in secondary school. However, research often does not support the claim that students that are more conscientious similarly achieve higher scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests. Based on the Invest-and-Accrue Model, we argue that conscientiousness explains to some extent why certain students receive better grades despite similar academic accomplishments (i.e., achieving similar scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests). Therefore, the present study examines to what extent the relationship between student personality and teacher-assigned grades consists of direct as opposed to indirect associations (via subject-specific standardized test scores). We used a representative sample of 14,710 ninth-grade students to estimate these direct and indirect pathways in mathematics and German. Structural equation models showed that test scores explained between 8 and 11% of the variance in teacher-assigned grades in mathematics and German. The Big Five personality traits in students additionally explained between 8 and 10% of the variance in grades. Finally, the personality-grade relationship consisted of direct (0.02 | β| ≤ 0.27) and indirect associations via test scores (0.01 | β| ≤ 0.07). Conscientiousness explained discrepancies between teacher-assigned grades and students' scores in domain-specific standardized tests to a greater extent than any of the other Big Five personality traits. Our findings suggest that students that are more conscientious may invest more effort to accomplish classroom goals, but fall short of mastery.