GRADING Writing Comments and Returning Student Work Helping Students to Understand Their Grades

You can help students understand their grades better by:

1. Discussing your criteria for grades,
2. Discussing the role of grades with respect to the goals of the course, and
3. Doing some grading exercises with students in section.

Grades play at least three roles: evaluation of students' work, communication about how they might improve, and motivation for them to do so. Students often do not fully appreciate these roles, and see grades as rewards or punishments for effort, or tickets to success or failure in life instead. For example, a student who has put a lot of effort into a mediocre paper may feel that he or she deserves a higher grade simply because of that effort. It is helpful to discuss the criteria for grades and their goals with respect to the course in advance of the first graded assignment.

Here are some exercises to help students to develop a better appreciation of the grading process:

Peer Review

Assign a short paper or ask students to bring a draft of their next assigned paper. Split students into pairs or small groups and have them read and evaluate each other’s papers together. Structure their time by giving them a checklist of tasks to work through as they review each other's work. For example, ask them to begin by working out a set of criteria to be used in evaluation. This exercise can be effective in getting students to think more deeply about the assessment process.

A similar exercise may be done with anonymous, sample papers provided by the instructor. These can be actual papers with the students' names removed (always ask permission before you do this) or papers that the GSI has written for this purpose.

Discuss Sample Papers

Identify sample assignments in each grade range, copy them and remove names, and discuss your comments and grades with students in section. (Again, always ask the writer's permission before you do this, and discuss each paper in a section in which its author is not present.) Explain why you chose to comment as you did, what criteria you used, and ask the students for suggestions about how the work might be improved. It is often interesting to have students vote on what grade they would give a particular assignment before telling them what grade it actually received. Surprisingly, students' grades tend to be lower than the actual grade.