Abstract

The reliability and validity of teacher’s involvement as summative assessors of their students’ performance in School-Based Assessment (SBA) has been frequently questioned. However, examination boards continue to use scores the classroom teachers award to students’ SBA tasks, because they believe “teachers are the best judges of students’ performance.” This quantitative, correlational study assessed the accuracy of teacher judgments and its implications for the validity of SBA scores. Data generated from Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) on the grades estimated by 89 teachers of 994 students from the 3 types of secondary schools in Jamaica and the students’ actual performance on the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC) examinations were analyzed using Spearman’s rho and crosstabulations. Results showed that teachers are moderately accurate in predicting their students’ performance. Also, some teacher, student and school factors were significantly related to the accuracy of the teachers’ judgments. The findings have implications for the accuracy of grades generated by examination boards that use SBAs.