Thriving in Academe

Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment

Four principles help make grading time-efficient, conducive to learning, and useful for departmental and institutional assessment.

Making grading more conducive to learning and using it to assess our departments and institutions are laudable goals, but how do we meet these aims? Four principles are keys to success.

Principle 1: Integrate grading with student engagement, motivation, and emotion
Grading is the elephant in the classroom. Don’t ignore it until you have a stack of papers on your desk. Instead, make grading part of the energy of your classroom and turn it toward learning. You can do this in several ways.

First, integrate grading into your course planning. The first consideration of course planning should not be the content you will cover, but the learning goals and the major assignments and exams that will assess students’ achievement of the learning goals. Establish the criteria for these assignments and exams. Then plan the entire course, including content and pedagogy, to help students reach the learning goals and meet the criteria.

Second, engage your students in the learning/grading process. Research suggests that student engagement—the energy students invest in the learning process—is the key to student learning. Talk about expectations for learning in your syllabus and in class discussion. Gather student feedback. For example, after the first major paper has been handed back with grades, ask students to write anonymously for five minutes in the classroom, on what aspects of the writing/guiding/grading process worked well for their learning and what changes they would suggest. The next class period, summarize the comments and tell students what you can or cannot do to incorporate their ideas.

Third, help students with self-talk, an aspect that research suggests affects learning. You don’t want students to say to themselves, “she gave me a bad grade because she doesn’t like me”; you want them to say “I got a lower grade than I had hoped, and I can learn to do better.” Strategies such as responding to drafts and then allowing revision, meeting with students who did not do well to talk about strategies for improvement, and making criteria very explicit all help to convey that hard work and engagement can result in success.

Fourth, manage the emotions around grading. Both learning and evaluation are often accompanied by strong emotions, and our students also handle stress from families and jobs. When a student bursts into tears or shouts angrily in your office, don’t be flustered or dismayed; be alert and stay focused. What do you want the student to learn at this moment? What memory do you want the student to carry away from this encounter? What values do you want to communicate through this interaction? Such moments of emotional intensity may be the most powerful teaching moments of the semester.

Principle 2: Establish explicit criteria
Being explicit about standards and criteria does not necessarily turn students from a motivation for learning to a motivation to get the grade. You can use the grading system as a way of communicating to students the standards for professional work in your field. Define in writing what it takes to get an A, B, C, and D on each assignment. Also use grades to define, encourage, and reward professional behaviors that students need to learn. For example, I ask my students to complete a self-report after each class session, in which they mark whether they came on time, with their class material. Did they contribute to the discussion at least twice, but not dominate the discussion? Did they appear to be listening attentively at all times? Did their comments show thorough knowledge of the reading assignment? Did their comments contribute in any of the following ways: offering support for a position someone else had advanced, offering an alternative to someone else’s position, connecting ideas, asking a thoughtful question, or daring to ask a dumb question? I review the self-reports to catch any that are seriously out of line, but most are reasonably accurate. At the end of the course, part of the students’ final grade is determined by the percentage of class periods for which the student met the criteria.

If my students ask, “What do I need to do to get an A?” I tell them, “Come to class on time, well-prepared, and contribute intelligently without dominating. Also, write papers that are well-organized and thoughtful rather than merely derivative, with claims that are clearly stated and fully supported. Address alternative points of view. Use clear language and follow the standards of edited written English.” A student does these things to get an A and also to learn. Like other human beings, including myself, students in my classes are multiply motivated—they do want to become well-educated people in the very best sense; they also want to earn a good living, get good grades, and, on some days, just get by. My aim is that these multiple motivations all move the student in the same direction.

Principle 3: Focus your grading efficiently on learning
In grading, the main relationship is between you and the learner, not between you and the errors. Focus on enhancing learning as efficiently as you can. “Issues to Consider” offers suggestions to help faculty save time in the grading process.

Principle 4: Use the grading process in departmental and institutional assessment
When a teacher constructs a careful assignment and an explicit rubric showing the criteria and standards for evaluating that assignment, she has excellent information not only for classroom improvement but also for departmental and institutional assessment. For example, in a political science department, faculty meet once a year to assess student work in two key classes—one near the middle of students’ program, and one at the end. Each faculty member teaching those courses brings one assignment that tests departmental learning goals, a rubric showing the faculty member’s grading criteria for the assignment, and class average scores on each item in the rubric. One year this method led faculty to discover a common weakness: Students did not know how to shape a question for inquiry in the discipline. They revised the curriculum to better develop those skills. In an engineering department, faculty saw that students’ computer programming skills, developed early in the curriculum, had declined by the time the students needed those skills for a later course, so they revised the course sequence to put the programming course closer to the course where such skills were required.

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