As long as graders achieve and maintain calibration as discussed later , relative grading should serve to keep answer assessment consistent across time and across graders. As much as the drafting committees and our test development process try to standardize MEE and MPT difficulty across exam administrations, it is impossible to create items that represent exactly the same degree of difficulty.
Without live pretesting, we must find some other fair way to take into account differences in MEE and MPT difficulty across exam forms. Relative grading means that an examinee who sits for a harder exam is not penalized and an examinee who sits for an easier one is not rewarded, because it focuses only on how examinees do in comparison to one another on the same exam. That would be unfair to the February examinees or, alternatively, would seem like a windfall to the July examinees if MEE and MPT items were graded according to an absolute standard.
The July examinees would get overall higher scores because the items were easier. In the world of high-stakes tests like the bar exam, this is a situation to avoid, and relative grading helps do that. It focuses on comparing answer quality according to other answers to the same items. Answers to easy items are still rank-ordered, as are answers to harder ones.
As long as graders are able to rank-order answers, they can fairly and consistently grade the MEE and MPT from administration to administration regardless of differences in exam form difficulty.
Examinee proficiency may vary across administrations. For example, in the February administration, examinee proficiency tends to be lower due to a larger proportion of repeat test takers. However, asking graders to maintain consistent grading standards across administrations, examinees, and items would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
There are simply too many moving parts across test administrations to make such a grading task reasonable for maintaining score meaning across administrations. But relative grading—comparing answers among the current pool of examinees and then scaling those raw scores to the MBE—is manageable for graders and fair to examinees.
It is also important to note that using a relative grading system rather than an absolute grading system does not mean that graders are artificially inflating or deflating grades in a way that allows more examinees to pass or causes more examinees to fail.
Likewise, relative grading does not benefit or penalize examinees who sit in jurisdictions that have a weaker or stronger examinee pool. By virtue of the equating process, those scores are on an absolute scale. Because the data have consistently shown across groups and time that the total MBE scaled score is strongly correlated with overall performance on the written components correlation above. As a result, an examinee whose total raw essay score is ranked at the top of a weak group will have, after scaling, a total scaled essay score that reflects that differential, and an examinee who is more toward the bottom of a strong group will have a total scaled essay score that accounts for that positioning as well.
Similarly, offsets are made via scaling to account for an examinee who sits for an administration with easier essay questions or one who sits for an administration with harder essay questions. The scaling process is critical to ensure that scores have a consistent meaning and also to ameliorate any efforts at gaming the system by attempting to pick a group or an administration that is anticipated to behave a certain way e. In addition to evening out the differences in MEE and MPT difficulty from one administration to the next, relative grading ameliorates grader harshness or leniency from one administration to the next and from grader to grader.
If a particular question is graded by a harsh grader or a lenient grader, as long as that grader is consistently harsh or lenient in rank-ordering, examinees are not unfairly penalized or rewarded—the rank-ordering decisions made by the grader remain; the actual raw scores assigned, whether harsh or lenient, are smoothed out to fit the MBE scaled score distribution.
Examinees will not be penalized even if harsher graders have a lower mean score than lenient graders. Note that if multiple graders are assigned to grade a single question, they must be calibrated so that they do not have different levels of harshness or leniency. The weight an item gets is strongly affected by the amount of variation that scores have on that item. The less variation, the less weight the item carries in determining the total written score value.
Relative grading on the MEE and MPT, both of which have multiple issues per item, allows graders to gather information about examinee performance and assign a score that accurately reflects examinee performance. All MEE and MPT items are drafted, reviewed, edited, and pretested to ensure that graders will be able to spread examinee scores according to relative quality if they follow grading instructions properly.
Graders should award points or credit reflecting the spectrum of the score scale used in their jurisdiction to maximize and equalize the information provided by each MEE or MPT item. Consider the following examples of what happens when a grader fails to discriminate among answers. Just added to your cart. Continue shopping. Close search.
It was created to test your ability to communicate law in a written format. What is a File on the MPT? After all, the MPT is 20 percent of your score. In other words, at least in theory, you can learn how to raise your score by up to 20 percent.
Nothing you can do on the essays will have anything like the same effect. You must of course prepare thoroughly for the essays, but preparing for the MPT will be more fruitful on a per-hour basis. If three days of intensive work on learning systems for all MPT tasks, practicing and getting feedback sounds good to you, sign up today. Enroll here. Stay with friends, or we will be happy to send you a list of hostels and hotels. The big MPT pay-off will help you, too.
The book is available from Legal Books Distributing and also from Amazon. To sign up for the course, go to the 3-Day page on the BarWrite website. You can benefit from the big MPT pay-off. This process ensures graders are using the same criteria so grading judgments are consistent for rank-ordering. Scaling adjusts for possible differences in average question difficulty and grader performance across different administrations of the exam.
Below is a chart showing how much the MPT is worth in each jurisdiction. The weight of each component varies per exam. MPT Grading Standards. Under relative grading, each MPT question is graded on a numbered scale based on the quality of the answer.
New York has even explained how the quality of writing counts towards grading as follows:. The NCBE recommends a six-point 0 to 6 raw grading scale , 19 but jurisdictions can use another scale as seen below.
Arkansas Scale ranging from 65 to 85 Colorado 1 to 6 point scale Illinois 0 to 6 point scale Massachusetts 0 to 7 point scale Missouri point scale New Jersey 0 to 6 point scale New York 0 to 10 point scale Vermont 0 to 6 point scale Washington State 0 to 6 point scale. Essay Grading Fundamentals by Judith A. Case, Ph. Albanese, Ph. Bosse, The Bar Examiner, December
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