Comparative Judgement and the Future of Assessment with Daisy Christodoulou Mind the Gap, Ep.125 (S6,E23)
episode
Mind the Gap: Making Education Work Across the Globe
1h 2m
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What is comparative judgement and why is it considered a better alternative to traditional rubric‑based marking?
Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap. We have a very exciting uh issue today because we are going to be talking to The legend is Daisy Christadulu. Welcome Daisy.
Hello, hot on, my American seaboe.
Yeah, I mean we've we've been uh I I think you're probably someone I guess I feel like a several years overdue, but you keep doing new things and you're you're one of the most famous West Ham supporters. Brilliant. We probably won't get into that, but we know we might do. Yeah. And you wrote books about assessment, uh, VAR, all kinds of stuff. But um Welcome to Mind the Gap. Do you do you want to just tell people a bit about, you know, what you're up to at the moment? Because I know a lot of people know who you are, but perhaps not everybody is. And so let's just let's get an update. What are you working on at the moment?
Sure, yeah. So I'm the director of education at No More Marking. Um we do a lot for about ten years now, we've done a lot involving um comparative judgment of extended writing. So we do a lot of assessments. We work with about two thousand schools or in England. Um so we've done a lot on writing assessment and what we've done in the last kind of twelve to eighteen months is um build a lot more AI into our assessments. So we now use AI to help teachers make judgments about students' writing and also to help them provide feedback. So it's been a a very exciting and interesting um at moment in time. Not not one that we necessarily expected, but but it has been very interesting.
No more marking is it's a great brand name. Yeah. If we go by what it says on the tin. Yeah. So I mean Let let's talk a bit about that because I feel like that's obviously a the core of what you're doing day to day. What yeah. Essentially, I mean for people who know what about comparative judgment and how it works. Tell tell me a bit a bit about the process.
Yeah, sure. So um if you think of the traditional way of assessing writing, or um you know, look at what you do for GCSEs, A levels, year six SATs, uh how you assess writing is a teacher will have an extended response from the student and what they'll typically have is some kind of mark scheme or rubric that will say, you know, to get the top grade you need to do A B C or XYZ. Um and the teacher will kind of the marker will progress through each essay, each piece of writing and and grade them all. That's the traditional way of assessing writing. And that's a form of what you would call absolute judgment, because what the teacher is doing is they're looking at one piece of writing and trying to place it on an absolute scale.
And the only problem with that is that human beings are not very good at absolute judgment. We're much better at comparative judgment. And comparative judgment is when you look at two things and you say which is better. So if I give you an analogy, as I say this holds true across across all different fields. If you're trying to uh judge someone's height, the absolute judgment would be, you know, one person walks into the room, you look at them and you say, How tall is that person? Comparative judgment would be two people walk in and you say who's taller. And you can probably see from that example that absolute judgment is hard. It's really difficult to do well and do accurately. Comparative judgment is much easier.
It's much easier to kind of look at two responses and say which is better. Obviously, um You know, the thing people say at this point is, well, you if you're just doing comparative judgment, you're just looking at two things, you know, how do you get the the grade at the end of it? And that's where kind of we come in and that's where the comparative judgment algorithm comes in. So the comparative judgment algorithm was developed in the nineteen twenties. We didn't invent it. It's been around for a while. And essentially what it means is you can make a series of these comparative judgments, uh, you know, either you on your own as a marker or you and your colleagues, or now you and an AI. And what the comparative judgment algorithm does is it combines together all of the comparative judgments and creates a measurement scale.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is comparative judgement and why is it considered a better alternative to traditional rubric‑based marking?
0:10–8:03
2
How does the comparative‑judgement algorithm turn thousands of pairwise comparisons into reliable writing scores?
8:03–16:49
3
Why is AI now being used to support (but not replace) human judgement in writing assessments?
16:49–24:01
4
What biases does the AI exhibit in comparative judgement and how does No More Marking mitigate them?
24:01–30:38
5
Why is keeping a human ‘in the loop’ essential for trustworthy AI‑generated feedback?
30:38–38:40
6
Which components of writing (sentence structure, vocabulary, etc.) drive the biggest gains in student progress?
38:40–47:46
7
How does the marathon analogy illustrate the need for progressive, varied practice in writing development?
47:46–55:17
8
What is the vision for the future of assessment when AI, comparative judgement and human expertise work together?
55:17–1:01:53
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Mind the Gap: Making Education Work Across the Globe
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