Assigning grades during an earthquake – shaken or stirred?

In the event of an unanticipated disruption to normal life, universities tend to shift to an online environment in both delivery and assessment. Course instructors still need to assign grades despite not having the full set of planned assessments. This paper examines how grades are disrupted when an increased reliance is placed on online assessments. We find substantial grade disruption and grade inflation as the weighting on online assessments rises relative to invigilated assessments. Grade inflation can be moderated by scaling to an historical distribution of grades; however, such scaling can lead to substantial grade disruption where the quality of the cohort is different from the historical average.