Assessment Theory 101: Compensatory vs Mastery Model Hi everyone, This post is more targeted at fellow teachers, tutors and assessment enthusiasts, but of course students are welcome to learn more about the various grading systems. Today's post is on compensatory model vs mastery model. For simplicity, compensatory model is often used in external assessments in many countries, but there's nothing stopping us from adopting the mastery model on end-of-unit assessments in class. To keep it simple, let's consider a short end-of-unit test on logarithms consisting of three topics: use properties of logarithms to simplify expressions solve exponential and logarithmic equations solve modelling problems involving exponential and logarithmic functions Each topic is worth 10 marks, giving a total of 30 marks for the whole paper. The pass mark is 50%, so 15/30 marks. Notice that there's a LOT of paths that would get students to 15/30. To illustrate my point later on, we'll cons...