Some of the most difficult and time-consuming work that instructors and TAs do is grading student work. Whether you’re an experienced teacher, or just starting out, you will find tips on this page to improve grading efficiency, make grading more equitable, fair, and clear to your students.
Purpose of Grading
Ultimately, your assessments should be structured and graded in ways that motivate learning, rather than punish mistakes. We grade student work to provide feedback, open lines of communication, motivate improvement, and evaluate performance.
- Provide Feedback - Grading gives the opportunity to provide short, targeted feedback. Limit overly critical feedback, and where possible, highlight at least one thing students did well, and one area they can improve upon.
- Open Lines of Communication - The goal of assessment is to enable both parties, teacher and student, to learn where they stand relative to the learning goals. Our grading should facilitate students’ reflection on their learning, allow them to demonstrate what they understand, and discover where they are struggling.
- Motivate Improvement - It’s important for our assessments to validate students’ progress, while encouraging them to learn from mistakes. Use Light-touch feedback techniques, and provide opportunities for students to improve their grades. Where possible, let them redo, revise, and repeat.
- Evaluate Performance - Grades are an evaluation of performance on a given task. Use specific performance criteria derived from the course learning objectives in your grading, and communicate to students what those performance criteria are before the assessment.
Make Grading Efficient
It benefits our students to receive feedback on their work in a timely manner, and we generally want to cut down the time we spend grading. You can strategize ways to make grading more efficient by using simplified metrics appropriate for the assignment, timing tools, and incorporating technologies.
For some lower-stakes assessments, consider using simplified metrics like plus-check-minus rather than letter grades or percentages so you can grade more quickly.
- Plus-Check-Minus
- Minus (or 0): Didn’t do or didn’t understand
- Check (or 1): Partially complete or missing something important
- Plus (or 2): Complete and/or correct
- Grade just some representative samples of student work. For instance, maybe only some questions are evaluated for accuracy and others on completion.
- In many classroom and homework activities, grading on participation (credit/no-credit) is adequate to encourage active learning and independent studying, and can cut down on overall grading load.
Use ‘Light-touch feedback’, which are brief emails to groups of students (e.g., ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D/F’ students) indicating your awareness of their performance on recent assignments, some commonly given feedback and encouragement targeted for each group of students, and direction to resources that can help them.
Teaching students how to learn and work in your discipline means teaching them to set learning goals, measure their progress, and figure out where to put their efforts for continuous improvement. They also need to learn how to critique their own work and that of their peers’ in appropriate ways.
- Have students assess their own work using some given criteria (see rubrics below) before they submit it so they can identify any gaps in their learning or disciplinary thinking.
- Allow student self-correction or peer-correction on short writing samples, quizzes and exams by making it a classroom or homework activity.
- Consider using online peer reviewing tools, like Eli Review, for students to provide peer feedback on each other’s work before students submit their work to you. It helps students turn in better work - which is always faster to grade!
- For summative assessments, consider having students write a few sentences as a cover letter to their work describing what the strengths and weaknesses of their work are from their own perspective. They submit the cover letter with their work, which gives you a better idea of what to give feedback on and what the real gaps in learning might be for your class.
Grading will take as much time as you give it - and more if you let it! Here are a few ideas to help you not get overwhelmed.
- Set a timer to strictly hold yourself to, for example, 3-5 minutes per assignment, or 10-15 minutes per essay. Limit your feedback to comments students can use for improvement.
- Create a grading schedule to space out your grading, and incorporate breaks to avoid burnout.
- Make sure to track your time spent grading.
- Grade with a fellow TA. Set a specific time to meet and get as much grading done as possible during that time.
- Ask people who have similar kinds of assignments for advice on how to grade, what to put your effort into, and how much time might be “too much”.
- Create a set of common phrases for feedback that you may find yourself giving to multiple students, and then copy/paste those onto student work, or use online grading tools in the course website to apply those phrases to student work with a few clicks.
Make Grading Equitable
Grading quickly is important, but cannot come at the expense of quality and fairness. We want our feedback to open lines of communication with students, and to be as transparent and accurate as possible, ensuring all students get a similar amount and type of feedback, with no preferential treatment. To make your grading more equitable, try implementing strategies like creating specific criteria or rubrics, TA group grading, and/or blind grading.
Specify the Criteria
Before grading assignments, consider what kinds of work your students are asked to perform on that assignment (answering questions on a quiz, responding to essay prompts, writing a paper, group work, etc.), and note which criteria you would need to see met for you to consider it to be a good performance on that work. This can increase your grading accuracy and consistency, thereby making it more equitable for your students. Then grade a few assignments using that criteria to see if you need to make adjustments. See the section on rubrics below for more details.
TA Group Grading
Grading with your fellow TAs or with a peer can help you stay consistent and discuss grading issues as they occur.
- Hold a Norming Session: All readers/TAs get together and grade examples of student work together to identify potential challenges and create a common set of expectations. If possible, identify A, B, C, and F papers/projects, or responses that exceed, meet, or do not meet expectations.
- Assign each grader a specific section/page of an exam to grade, instead of a certain number of exams to grade in full. This helps ensure consistency in grading across all exams and across different sections of students.
Blind Grading
Blind Grading means that you are unaware of the students’ identities (e.g., names) as you grade the work. This reduces the likelihood of grading student performance based on your subjective understanding of the students.
- In Canvas, you can select “Anonymous Grading” to hide student identities (remind students to submit their assignments without identifying information in the document itself).
- For blue books, go through and open all at once so you cannot see names as you move through the stack.
- For essays, require students to only put their names on cover sheets which can be flipped over as you move though the stack.
Rubrics: Grading Papers, Projects, and Creative Work
Papers, projects, presentations and creative work usually involve a combination of critical thinking skills and multiple genres of work from students (such as group work, public speaking, academic writing, casual writing, graphic design, etc.). Rubrics help instructors determine and grade the specific combination of skills represented by a complex assignment by measuring each required skill independently, while also looking at students' work holistically. Rubrics also clarify and prioritize an assignment’s requirements, so students can focus their efforts appropriately and identify gaps in their learning. All of this makes your grading more equitable and efficient!
Rubrics: A Grading Tool
Rubrics should be customized for each assignment to ensure that instructors are measuring the learning objectives associated with the assignment. They typically contain three essential components:
- A list of criteria that will be graded (i.e. thinking skills used in the assignment and format requirements. For example, ‘depth of analysis’ and ‘reference list’).
- Descriptions of how students demonstrate those criteria on the assignment.
- An evaluative scale that shows how many points each criterion is worth or what level of proficiency the student has attained.
Choose a grading framework that aligns with the complexity of the assignment and the level of detailed feedback students need about their work. All rubrics should leave space for instructor comments. Here are some example rubric frameworks:
- Checklist: List of expectations that are either met or not met, with an area for overall comments.
- Analytic Matrix: (see simplified example in video above as well) Includes multiple performance criteria, rating scales, and description and/or examples of indicators for each rating.
- Single Point: Describes acceptable proficiency in each criteria only (no gradations of proficiency) and leaves space for comments.
- Holistic: 3-5 levels of performance, along with a broad definition of the characteristics that define each level.
Most rubrics are organized into a matrix, with the thinking skills and requirements listed in the left column, descriptions of those criteria in the other columns, and a grading scale that applies a certain number of points to each criterion either in the top row or as its own column.
Many rubrics look more like a checklist, with each criterion listed with its descriptions of proficiency in paragraph form or as bullet points. The scale can be in the descriptions or somewhere else on the document - as long as the students can see the relative weights or acceptable performance levels for the criteria so they know where to focus their energies.
For creative projects it is important you provide enough structure to allow you to evaluate work fairly, while encouraging students to express themselves. Also make all minimum requirements very clear, like sources/references, page/word limits, or time limits for presentations, and formatting.
Try to create the rubric as you write or modify the assignment instructions. Then give it to the students with the instructions. Tell them to use it as a reference for where to focus their efforts. Consider allowing the students to fill out the rubric themselves as a cover letter to their assignment submission. Return the rubric to the student with their graded work so they can see the rationale behind the grade they received.
- If you have a digital rubric on the course website or another grading tool, then you will fill out the rubric options when you create the assignment submission. As you grade each submission you will see options for assigning points and leaving comments.
- If you have a paper document that you are using as a rubric, print out a rubric for each student, and then use a pencil to check off the matrix cells that best describe the student’s performance and write comments. A pencil allows you to make adjustments as you grade the class.
- If you have a digital document as a rubric, copy/paste it onto their work or on the grading screen, or attach it to their submission in the grading area. Alternatively, have the students add the rubric (unfilled) to their work, or as an attachment to it. You can use the digital grading tools to fill it out.
We recommend giving your students the rubric at the same time you give them the assignment instructions. This can reduce the number of questions and future complaints about unfair grading. You can also reference the rubric while teaching related skills and content.
If students are writing an essay during a midterm or final exam time, distribute the rubric several weeks in advance of the due date, so they can use it to focus their studying and preparation.