How To Make Grading More Tolerable: Policy

Photo: Luis Llerena

Grading can easily become the bane of teaching, especially if you don't find enough time to complete all your grading throughout the semester, leaving too much of it at the end in between final exams and final grade submission. Here are some policy-based tips to make this teaching component easier to swallow.

• Binary Grading 

Although clear rubrics are an old standby, I found when I tried peer grading with rubrics, fellow students would grade each other much too hard, and when I used rubrics alone, I would begin to negotiate the grade too much in my own internal monologue.

The algorithmic nature of an upper-level Computer Science course made me rethink all that, and I decided to employ what I explained to my students as "Binary Grading."

Simply put, there was a threshold of competency for students to meet in their work, the earned a "1," and if they failed to meet that threshold they earned a "0." As I scaffolded all of my large assignments into smaller components, this allowed for a range of grades.

Of course, the difficulty here is not using a 0.5 grade when the student has met some expectations, in that case it is best to have a clear revision policy.


• Crowdsourcing
  
  Cathy Davidson lays out this system in detail on a blog post on HASTAC.
  
  In a student-led course, with students responsible for learning and teaching to their peers (any teacher knows how effective learning is when you have to teach the material later!), the students leading a certain topic (the experts) will grade their fellow students.
  
  Here, Davidson suggests a thumbs-up / thumbs-down approach much like binary grading, with a revision turning a thumbs-down to a thumbs-up.
  
  
• Do All the Work: Get an A
  
  In this same post, Davidson also outlines an approach where if students complete all the work, they get an A, if they don't need an A they can aim for a B and complete enough work for that grade. Again, this can be based on a binary or check system so that minimal time is spent negotiating with the language that may be coming from inherited rubrics.
  
  This can work well for students who are struggling with jobs, family, or other outside forces on their plates, and just need to see what they need to get through a course. And a clear policy like this can really put an end to students worried about their grades throughout the semester. The key here is communication and transparency with students, which is a good policy for any grading system.