A section's average grade is a fact about its students until it is read against a score no marker's judgment touches. On the worked cohort in this pack, an economics course's final exam, 357 students sit across 6 sections, each assessment split between a multiple-choice half and an essay half. One section grades 0.37 of a band harder than its own students' multiple-choice performance predicts, and a second shows a different fault: essay scores landing within a couple of points of each other regardless of quality.
Ohio State's guidance for large-enrollment courses names the fix directly: compare a grader's subjective scores against a more objective measure from the same assessment, such as the multiple-choice half, rather than comparing raw section averages to each other. That comparison is the residual this pack computes for every section, in standard deviations, in points, and in the course's own grading bands, so a department reads a number it already knows how to act on.
Built for department chairs and course coordinators moderating a multi-section assessment marked by more than one person, and for anyone who has watched two sections drift apart and could not tell whether the students or the marking caused it. Before trusting a flag, item analysis review is where to check that the anchor's own questions are behaving. Where the shared rubric itself is the harder problem, the rubric pack is where it gets rewritten.
Grade Analysis and Moderation Template