What do you use as your mastery score when aligning outcomes with question banks?

[eric_orton]

When aligning an question bank to an outcome, one must set "mastery for any score at or above" a certain threshold. The default in Canvas is 60%, and that feels rather low to me. For most grading scales, it would be 1% higher than failure, and I'd like to think that want more than that.

At the same time, the "man on the street" definition of mastery (which, I believe, would be something like "You know this stuff so well others would think you are an expert") may be too high a bar. I'm not sure its mastery (in that sense) that we are trying to document, so much as competency ("You have average, basically satisfactory understanding or skill").

So, I'm thinking that maybe defaulting to around 70% to 75%, the equivalent of a C, may be good. However, I'm interested in what other designers think and are doing. What do you use as your mastery score when aligning outcomes with question banks?

[pwalsh]

I have only toyed with this functionality in Canvas, but did it with our last LMS for my science classes. I set mastery to 80%, but that LMS only used a single score to determine mastery rather than allowing for multiple scores to go into the calculation. I would think that if you're using decaying average you could go as low as 70%, but you may need to adjust as you learn how it really works. If you're just relying on the most recent score or the highest score, 80% works just fine in practice. 80% ensures that a student knows enough that they'll retain most of it as the year goes on. I found students who didn't achieve 80% often had no recollection of the material by the end of the year. I have no idea why 80% is so magical. I'm sure some researcher knows!

I'll be setting this up for next year in Canvas (I'm the only one at my school that I know of who's using outcomes), so I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to do.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @eric_orton ,

We are giving the Instructional Designers area a little bit of love and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie