Grading Student Work

• What Purposes Do Grades Serve?
• Developing Grading Criteria
• Making Grading More Efficient
• Providing Meaningful Feedback to Students
• Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-Sectioned Courses
• Minimizing Student Complaints about Grading

What Purposes Do Grades Serve?

Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson identify the multiple roles that grades serve:

• as an evaluation of student work;

• as a means of communicating to students, parents, graduate schools, professional schools, and future employers about a student's performance in college and potential for further success;

• as a source of motivation to students for continued learning and improvement;

• as a means of organizing a lesson, a unit, or a semester in that grades mark transitions in a course and bring closure to it.

Given all that grades do and represent, it's no surprise that they are a source of anxiety for students and that grading is often a stressful process for instructors.

Incorporating the strategies below will not eliminate the stress of grading for instructors, but it will decrease that stress and make the process of grading seem less arbitrary -- to instructors and students alike.

Source: Walvoord, B. & V. Anderson (1998). Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.

Developing Grading Criteria

• Consider the different kinds of work you'll ask students to do for your course.  This work might include: quizzes, examinations, lab reports, essays, class participation, and oral presentations.

• For the work that's most significant to you and/or will carry the most weight, identify what's most important to you.  Is it clarity? Creativity? Rigor? Thoroughness? Precision? Demonstration of knowledge? Critical inquiry?

• Transform the characteristics you've identified into grading criteria for the work most significant to you, distinguishing excellent work (A-level) from very good (B-level), fair to good (C-level), poor (D-level), and unacceptable work.

Developing criteria may seem like a lot of work, but having clear criteria can

• save time in the grading process
• make that process more consistent and fair
• communicate your expectations to students
• help you to decide what and how to teach
• help students understand how their work is graded

Sample criteria for a few different types of assignments are available via the following links.

• Sample Criteria for Essays and Papers

• Sample Criteria for Class Participation

• Sample Rubrics Range of Disciplines and Assignment Types

Making Grading More Efficient

• Create assignments that have clear goals and criteria for assessment.  The better students understand what you're asking them to do the more likely they'll do it!

• Use different grading scales for different assignments.  Grading scales include:

  • letter grades with plusses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.)

  • 100-point numerical scale (for exams, certain types of projects, etc.)

  • check +, check, check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.)

  • pass-fail or credit-no-credit (for preparatory work)

• Limit your comments or notations to those your students can use for further learning or improvement.

• Spend more time on guiding students in the process of doing work than on grading it.

• For each significant assignment, establish a grading schedule and stick to it.

• Other Strategies for Making Grading More Efficient

Providing Meaningful Feedback to Students

• Use your comments to teach rather than to justify your grade, focusing on what you'd most like students to address in future work.

• Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an assignment.

• Comment primarily on patterns -- representative strengths and weaknesses.

• Avoid over-commenting or "picking apart" students' work.

• In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students rather than provide answers for them.

• Suggestions About Making Marginal and End Comments on Student Writing

Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-sectioned Courses (for course heads)

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to teaching assistants, graders, and students in your course.

• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your teaching assistants and graders.

• Encourage teaching assistants and graders to share grading concerns and questions with you.

• Use an appropriate group grading strategy:

  • have teaching assistants grade assignments for students not in their section or lab to curb favoritism (N.B. this strategy puts the emphasis on the evaluative, rather than the teaching, function of grading);

  • have each section of an exam graded by only one teaching assistant or grader to ensure consistency across the board;

  • have teaching assistants and graders grade student work at the same time in the same place so they can compare their grades on certain sections and arrive at consensus.

Minimizing Student Complaints about Grading

• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus.

• Avoid modifying your policies, including those on late work, once you've communicated them to students.

• Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.

• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focusing rather on course learning goals.

For a comprehensive look at grading, see the chapter "Grading Practices" from Barbara Gross Davis's Tools for Teaching.

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