What are the Criteria of a Good Scheme of Evaluation?

Criteria of a Good Scheme of Evaluation

When one talks of evaluation, the question that instantly arises in one’s mind is what type of test procedure, assessment device or evaluation scheme can be considered as effective in terms of serving the purposes of evaluation, A list of criteria can be analysed for the same by emphasizing the following characteristics.

1. Interest:

Tests that are interesting and enjoyable help to gain the cooperation of the students.

2. Proper graduation:

The items of the evaluation tool or questions of the paper should be properly graded in order of increasing difficulty suiting to the age, experience, ability and intelligence of the students.

3. Practicability:

The test or evaluation system should also be as practical as possible. For meeting this criteria, it should be easy to prepare, easy to administer, easy in scoring etc.

4. Diagnosticity:

A test or evaluation scheme should be as diagnostic as possible. It must be able to diagnose properly the strong and weak points of the students, their interest and abilities, the success or failure of the methods of teaching or efforts of a teacher etc.

5. Objectivity:

It is said to be objective when it is not affected at all through the personal opinion, impressions, biases, interests and attitudes of both the examinee and the examiner. In a test, if the questions are set in such a way that the examiners give different answer of may pick up different methods to provide the solution suiting their own interests, opinions and attitudes, the test is said to be subjective. Contrary to this, if the responses to the test items by the examinees or scoring by the examiners do not get affected through their subjectivity, the evaluation system may be called as objective.

6. Comprehensiveness:

It refers to its length and extensiveness as to cover the complete course or learning experiences to be tested. It should be competent enough to test all the stipulated objectives in terms of knowledge, understanding, skills, abilities, interests and attitudes etc.

7. Reliability:

A test is said to be reliable when it tends to put the same results even after its repetition at number of times. It stands for consistency of working behaviour of a device.

In case, different examiners award almost the same score to an examinee by going through its examination answer book, we can conclude that the examination device or test paper is quite reliable. However, if the marks awarded by different examiners differ significantly, it may cast serious doubts in the reliability of the evaluation system.

8. Validity:

A test is said to be valid when it measures what it needs to measure. Validity in this sense stands for the accuracy of the working or behaviour of a device.

For example, a test meant for assessing the extent of the realization of the objectives of science teaching must be limited to this purpose only. In case it tries to assess or measure the linguistic ability or general knowledge of the learners, it cannot be treated as valid or true with regards to its aims and purposes.