Why Grading Makes Us Anxious Too
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“There is nothing more demoralizing than the thought that the countless hours we spend grading might be dismissed as meaningless.” – Elizabeth Bare
Although many students think “they are the only ones who worry about grades,” writes Elizabeth Bare, in a recent blog post, “anxiety about grades is also a central feature of faculty life.” While students often worry about how their grades will affect their progress toward graduation, faculty often worry about whether their approaches to grading are valid, fair, and efficient, or as Bare puts it, “meaningful, moral, and manageable.” This tip explores ways of better aligning learning and grading, so attention to one translates to attention to both.
Are my grades meaningful?
When considering whether her grades are meaningful, Bare thinks about grades as measures but wrestles with what they are actually measuring: “performance, competency, growth, or effort?” To make grades as meaningful as possible, we must first define clear goals for student learning. Then, we can design assessments (e.g. projects, tests, quizzes, assignments, and so on) that collect evidence of students’ progress toward those goals. If our assessments measure what we intend for them to measure, the grades students earn with their work will align more closely with their progress toward accomplishing the goals of the course--and therefore be more meaningful.
Are they moral?
When exploring the morality of her approach to grading, Bare is really concerned with the issue of fairness: creating “a system of grading that ensures students in similar circumstances will be treated similarly.” Because developing them helps us define evaluation criteria, rubrics are invaluable tools for making grading more fair. They can help keep us focused on the most important aspects of an assignment as we evaluate each student’s work. This helps us to avoid deducting points for minutia irrelevant to the learning goals we’re trying to assess.
Two additional strategies related to fairness are grade norming and “blind grading,” or grading anonymous student work. Grade norming entails working with colleagues in an effort to evaluate student work more consistently. It’s particularly important for instructors and TAs working together to grade student work within the same course. To grade anonymously, we can ask students to use the last few digits of their Panther IDs instead of their names, or we might try an anonymous grading feature online. Canvas and Blackboard both include anonymous grading options through which we can review student work, provide feedback, and assign a grade without seeing students’ names.
Are they manageable?
Rubrics can also help with the management of grading. Starting with clearly defined criteria for success can improve the quality of the assignments you receive. This clear picture aids students in getting closer to accomplishing the goals on each attempt, allowing for more targeted feedback. Many colleagues have shared with us that dividing up the work of grading (e.g. grading only five projects in one sitting) also helps make the task more manageable and less overwhelming.
Bare experimented with using specifications grading in her course and reported that “the grading was most certainly faster and less anxiety inducing, as I expected it would be.” Her post describes her approach to using “specs” grading in her course, and it also links to several sample syllabi from other courses in which faculty adopted this method.
References
Bare, E. (2016) Meaningful, moral, and manageable. The grading holy grail. Rice University. Retrieved from: http://cte.rice.edu/blogarchive/2016/2/9/grading
Nilson, L. (2015) Specifications Grading. Stylus: Sterling, VA.
Submitted by:
Ileana Hernandez, Ph.D., LMHC
Assistant Director for Assessment, Evaluation, and Teaching Assistant Development
Center for the Advancement of Teaching
Instructor, Department of Psychology
Florida International University
More tips and just-in-time resources are available at https://conhi.asu.edu/academic-innovation