What About Grades?

Beginning teachers soon discover that grading assignments can be a difficult and occasionally perplexing task. Because many decisions about grading are dictated by a particular course and its goals and objectives, only the most general issues are covered below. Official College policies about grading are covered in Policies and Procedures Regarding Teaching Schedules, Grading, and Advising. If you have responsibilities for grading, you should, if possible, consult with an experienced faculty member in your department.

Once you have decided on your objectives for the course, grading becomes largely a process of translating those objectives into quantified performance standards. Make sure the class understands exactly what success entails. Tests must always test the right thing to meet the course goals, or else students direct their energies to the source of the grade and away from your goals. The students should not be good at the course at first, so you need to leave room within your grading system for improvement. Yet the grades should not cause all your students to abandon hope.

Hand assignments back promptly. Students are less likely to go the extra distance for a subsequent assignment when they do not know how you evaluated an earlier one. Quite simply, if they don't know where to put the extra effort, they don't put it any where. When you hand back a graded assignment, report on the section averages and offer a way to address the common mistakes. Discuss the best answer in the group but do not embarrass a student through praise or criticism. If possible, hand back graded material individually, not in a public folder or box where the privacy of the individual is not respected.

When grading a stack of papers or tests, establish consistent criteria for all of them, take frequent breaks, grade all of one question at a time, and then shuffle the paper and grade all of the next question. Be positive in tone, make the most important problems clear, and do not overwhelm a student's writing with yours. Summarize at the end so the student knows how to focus both on what went wrong (and how it can be corrected) and on what went right. Note improvement. Never use a grade as a threat. If you cannot be objective about a student—through dislike or affection—ask a colleague to check on your grading. Avoid favoritism or the appearance of favoritism—the class needs to feel they can rely on your fairness.

Keep a record of the grade distributions for each graded assignment. If the grade distributions are consistently skewed, you may want to look at your standards more closely. Clusters of grades may indicate that your assignments or the standards you are using do not differentiate well among different levels of performance. Although it is possible to have a class in which all the students are performing equally well, more often clusters of scores will indicate inappropriately designed testing and grading methods. Further, if all your students fail a particular assignment, you should try to determine why. It is simply not reasonable to assume that all, or even nearly all, the students in a class in the College are incapable of or unwilling to produce acceptable college-level work.

Finally, try to keep the students focused on the learning processes involved in completing assignments rather than on the evaluation process. If they feel they are learning something and not just being judged harshly or arbitrarily, they will be more likely to accept, value and try to comply with the standards you set for them.