"I got a good grade", "The grades have gone bad!" - in these expressions and in colloquial speech, the words "assessment" and "mark" are often used as absolute synonyms, but is this correct? What are the criteria for their presentation in different areas, what is the difference between them, what types they are and what or who can be evaluated - all this will be discussed below.
Let's look at the dictionary
The word "mark" has several meanings, similar to each other only in that they are talking about determining the value of a phenomenon by some parameter. The dictionary entry gives three main interpretations:
- directly the process of evaluating, determining the parameters of quality and quantity of something;
- any opinion, feedback or judgment about anything or anyone;
- a mark given to students in educational institutions.
As you can see, in the latter case, the words "assessment" and "mark" become synonymous, especially in the field of education, they intersect in their meanings, but still they have some differences, which will be discussed below. The main valuesthe words "mark" are:
- a sign indicating something, or the process of setting such signs;
- recording something;
- some symbol of knowledge and/or behavior of a student;
- designation using numbers of the height of an object in relation to sea level or another point taken as a reference point.
Class grades
Despite the frequent use of the terms "grade" and "mark", even in school life there is a significant difference between them. A grade is a measure of a student's performance against an ideal, expressed in numbers or points. At the same time, the assessment is an indicator of the student's performance, his growth relative to his performance at the beginning of the current stage of education.
The latter is a broader and more precise description of the student's knowledge, since it often also includes some recommendations that may be useful. Converting the assessment results into points greatly narrows their meaning and content, moreover, it can turn the learning process into a pursuit of a mark for the sake of the mark itself.
How to evaluate performance?
In the case of activities, evaluation is a fairly formal procedure for evaluating the activities of an employee, most often associated with collecting information about how successfully he performs the tasks assigned to him. At the same time, evaluation is carried out both in comparison with the results of other people, and in comparison with their own.employee's performance in the past. In this case, performance appraisal, also called labor appraisal, is a multi-faceted process. It takes into account both the performance and discipline of the employee, his reputation and their impact on the overall success of the work.
What is an evaluation of the working environment?
By what parameters is this position displayed? In talking about working conditions, assessment is a set of activities whose task is to identify harmful and / or dangerous factors in the environment in which labor activity takes place, correlate them with established standards and determine how they affect the he alth of employees and the success of their activities. Such an assessment includes several stages:
- identifying workplace hazards;
- assessment of how the conditions at the workplace meet the requirements of labor protection;
- monitoring the situation on the ground with dangerous and/or harmful working conditions;
- establishment of special guarantees for workers with dangerous and / or harmful working conditions and payment of compensations provided for by law.
Nuclear power plants, plants and factories associated with the chemical industry, mines and drilling rigs are examples of enterprises where such inspections are carried out much more frequently.
What is art appreciation?
Quite often, not only phenomena that haveapplied significance, but also cultural phenomena. For example, works of art are regularly assessed. In this case, evaluation is a determination of how well a work meets certain criteria set in advance. Two coordinate systems can be distinguished here: the modern one, which includes only the criterion of innovativeness of the work, its novelty, and the traditional system, which includes several factors at once:
- aesthetic criterion, which includes both the idea of the beautiful and the ugly, and the criterion of expressiveness and inexpressiveness;
- epistemological criterion containing such pairs as "true - false", "understandable - incomprehensible", "reasonable - unreasonable";
- moral and ethical criterion that evaluates a work of art in terms of morality, normality, creativity and destructiveness;
- emotionally-evaluative criterion, the most subjective of the listed ones, evaluating a work, for example, from the standpoint of how interesting it is for a person.
Summing up
Summing up, we can say that evaluation is a fairly broad phenomenon, affecting both industrial and cultural spheres of our lives. Moreover, it is quite often something subjective, although work is underway to create universal, absolutely objective evaluation criteria that would minimize the influence of human emotions on the process of evaluating an object,phenomena, deeds or events, their qualities and influence on certain areas of activity.
