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Bands and Criteria in Inspera Assessment provide a flexible manual strategy for marking questions, allowing graders to mark within categories/criteria, and award marks using thresholds/bands per category. This feature enables a nuanced approach to assessment, particularly for manually marked question types. 

This article explains what Bands and Criteria are, covers their availability and activation, details how to author a question using them, describes previewing your setup, and provides a practical example of their application.

Overview of bands and criteria

Bands and Criteria is a manual marking strategy designed to enable graders to assess candidate responses within specific categories and award marks based on defined performance bands per category.

Bands and criteria are available for the following manually marked question types:

• Essay
• Oral
• Text Area
• Upload Assignment
• Programming
• Math working
• Audio Record

When you use Bands and Criteria marking for a question, this automatically requires you to set thresholds for the entire test.

Instructions

1. Within the question editor, you will configure your Bands and Criteria setup:
   1. In the question editor, click on the Marks dropdown menu.
   2. In the next dropdown menu select Bands and Criteria.

   3. Click on Edit to start configuring your bands and criteria. 

      

2. A new panel will appear for you to define your bands and criteria:
   1. Name the criteria: Provide a clear name for each criterion (category) you create.
   2. Decide total marks for the criteria: Set the maximum marks achievable for each individual criterion.
   3. Name the band (optional): Give a name to each band within a criterion (e.g., "Excellent," "Good").
   4. Fill in the epic text of the band: Provide a detailed description of what performance looks like at each band level.
   5. Give the band a score: Assign a score to each band. These scores should be in descending order from the maximum marks for that criterion.
3. To add more criteria or bands to your setup, click Add within the editing panel.

4. Always preview your question to verify your Bands and Criteria setup. In Preview, you can see the bands to each criteria. By hovering over the marks, the band to the corresponding mark will be highlighted.

   After you have added all Bands and Criteria, you will see the criteria and marks reflected in the general settings for the question. 

   

Example of the use of bands and criteria

In the example below, we have created a category of Bands and Criteria designed for assessing Task Achievement.

•  

  • Criteria Name: Task Achievement
  • Criterion Max Marks: 10
  • Band Names:
    • Fully satisfies task
    • Mostly satisfies task
    • Does not satisfy task
  • Band Descriptions:
    • Fully satisfies all the requirements of the task.
    • Covers most requirements of the task.
    • Covers only some requirements of the task.
  • Band Scores (descending order from max marks):
    • Fully satisfies task (10.00 marks)
    • Mostly satisfies task (7.00 – 9.99 marks)
    • Does not satisfy task (4.00 – 6.99 marks)

  

Note on compatibility with maximum marks

When setting up Bands and Criteria, please be aware that the default value for the question's overall mark is independent of any value previously defined in the Maximum Marks setting. 

If a maximum mark is defined within your Bands and Criteria setup, that value will persist even if you later switch back to using the standard Maximum Marks setting for the question. For example, in the image above, found in the Preview your Bands and Criteria section, the value would be 36.