Health sciences, or health professions, education aims to develop students into competent professionals. This responsibility necessitates examination of the training and assessment of these future professionals to improve programs and patient care. However, grading can be fraught with issues, leading to misunderstanding, and grading health professions students comes with its own unique challenges, such as preparing students for certification exams and assessing clinical skills. A scoping review of the literature was performed through a search of EBSCO, including Academic Search Premier, APA PsycINFO, Education Abstracts, ERIC, and Vocational and Career Collection databases. Combinations of the terms grading practices, assessment practices, assessment tools, assessment methods, health sciences education, allied health and health professions education were used. There was no restriction on the date of article publication, yielding 328 articles. After removing duplicates and screening titles, abstracts, and full-texts, 34 articles were included. This review revealed a patchwork of literature in which it was difficult to find common themes. Nonetheless, we categorized these studies, finding that they fell into many disparate groups and themes, including theory-based papers emphasizing grading reform, tools for grading student clinical practice, assessment of certain learning modalities, student feedback on the fairness and relevance of assessment practices, and others. The literature on grading practices in health sciences is rather heterogeneous, with some programs unrepresented altogether. Therefore, increased study of this subject is needed, particularly in health professions fields that have little to no published research.
