Students' self-grading, professor's grading and negotiated final grading at three university programmes: analysis of reliability and grade difference ranges and tendencies

This study was undertaken at three teacher education programmes and was designed to determine the following within each programme: (1) the reliability correlations among students' self-grade (SSG), the grade granted by the professor (PG) and the negotiated final grade (NFG); (2) the range and frequency of grade differences between SSG and PG; and (3) the tendency of the negotiation on NFG as compared to SSG (i.e. NFG > SSG or NFG < SSG), when SSG was not equal to PG. The samples were made up of three professors and their corresponding student groups (students, n = 100, 34 and 53, respectively), each in a different teacher education programme. The results show that there was a high reliability correlation among SSG, PG and NFG in all three programmes. Furthermore, in these programmes, the grade differences were never higher than 1.5 on a scale of 0 to 10 points; in fact, agreement between DDG and PG was reached 96%, 35.29% and 43.39% of the time), and, when disagreement emerged, it was mainly within a minimum range of 0.1 to 0.5 points. As for the tendency of NFG versus SSG in each programme, slightly higher percentages were obtained for NFG > SSG in Programmes B and C, whereas the opposite (NFG < SSG) was true in Programme A; overall, however, it could be said that both tendencies balanced each other out, being the total percentages in each programme 0%, 41% and 30% for NFG > SSG; and 4%, 23% and 26%, for NFG < SSG, respectively.