Exemplary professor's approach to academic evaluation and the extent of its use by other faculty members

To identify the approach taken by the exemplary professors in evaluating student achievement, a total of 15 such individuals in three universities were interviewed. According to them, a valid approach to the evaluation of student achievement consists of four elements: 1- identified goals, criteria, and methods of evaluation; 2- continuous evaluation; 3- types of questions and ways of writing and scoring them; 4- giving feedback and assuring students. To explore the extent to which such an approach is used by the general faculty members, a questionnaire was distributed among a randomly selected sample of 1245 students. Results show that the general faculty members use this approach only to a moderate extent (mean score of 3.5 out of 5) and in doing so there were no significant differences between different faculties or different ranks if the faculty members. However, the work experience seems to have made a significant difference.