Question

What are some disadvantages of this Portfolio Plan?

Answer 1

Portfolio Assessment’s Inherent Limitations

There are three major reasons portfolios are not appropriate for higher education assessment programs: They are (a) not standardized, (b) not feasible for large-scale assessment due to administration and scoring problems, and (c) potentially biased. Indeed, course grades, aggregated across an academic major or program, provide more reliable and better evidence of student learning than do portfolios. Here’s why.

Lack of Standardization

Standardization refers to assessments in which (a) all students take the same or conceptually and statistically parallel measures; (b) all students take the measures under the same administrative conditions (such as on-site and time limits); (c) the same evaluation methods, graders, and scoring criteria are applied consistently to all of the students’ work; and (d) the score assigned to a student most likely reflects the quality of the work done by that student and that student alone (without assistance from others).

Not Feasible for Large Scale Learning Assessment

By their un-standardized nature, portfolios (even electronic ones) are not practically feasible on a large scale. A moment’s reflection reveals why this is true. Because of their length, a single grader will typically need an hour or so to grade a single portfolio. To assure adequate score reliability, each portfolio needs at least two independent graders (and major differences between them should be resolved by a third). In addition, due to the potential interdisciplinary nature of a portfolio’s contents, raters with different areas of expertise might be needed which could lead to even more scoring time and feasibility problems.

Bias

A portfolio may include a photograph, videoclip, or other information about student identities. Their gender, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics also may be known by those evaluating the portfolio. This lack of anonymity may bias results.