Chapter 6. Grading and Evaluating Student Work

This chapter is intended to help you develop your own strategies for grading and responding to student work in ways that account for diversity in how students learn, as well as the obstacles they often face. We offer suggestions for how to be encouraging, efficient, purposeful, and constructive in your grading and feedback.

Chapter Outline

Introduction

Terminology

Assessment

Grading

Evaluation

Feedback

Getting Started with Evaluating Student Work

What is Your Overall Approach to Grading?

Standards-based Grading

Ungrading and Contract-Based Grading

Choosing What and How to Grade

Quantity and Quality

Competition vs Collaboration

Course Goals and Scaffolding

Setting Up a Gradebook

Feedback

Minimal Marking

Appropriately-Timed Feedback

Collective Feedback

Proportionate Feedback

Feedback Towards Revision

Higher Order Feedback

Heuristic Feedback

Spot Checking

Readerly Feedback

Summing Up

Peer and Self-Evaluation

Peer Review

Student Self-Evaluation

Introduction

Students do not get credit for classes until they are assigned a passing grade. The process of grading can be anxiety-provoking for instructors and students alike. This aspect of teaching comes with challenges around fairness, equity, workload, and purpose. There are a wide range of methods that can be used, including a set of practices known as “ungrading,” which critically approach the question of grading and evaluation in our educational system.

Learning to teach effectively takes time, and giving students grades and feedback constitutes a significant percentage of that time. Ideally, you want to find an approach that is useful and generative for students and mindful of your own labor as the instructor.

Terminology

Assessment. Grading. Evaluation. Feedback. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings when we teach. Understanding these terms and the practices associated with them is an important first step in constructing your own approach to this key component of being a college instructor.  

Assessment

“Assessment” is sometimes used as a synonym for grading or evaluation, but in education it often has a more formal meaning that connects what happens in classes and curricula to processes of accreditation and institutional review. In this more formal framing, assessment requires a systematic collection and review by faculty and administrators of artifacts and other sources. Departments and programs may designate particular classes as points in the curriculum to gather data for assessment. If your course is designated as an assessment course, your students’ work may be used in programmatic assessment. As such, you might be asked to have students complete or submit a particular assignment designed by the department.

In its broader, less formal meaning, it’s useful to think of two categories of assessments: formative and summative.

• Formative assessments: help the instructor to modify their teaching to better match the needs of the students. Formative assessments can be high-stakes (i.e. represent a significant portion of the grade), but they are often low-stakes. Examples include quizzes, self-assessments, and first drafts of writing assignments.

• Summative assessments: tend to have higher stakes, and measure student performance against a standard. They generally come at the end of an instructional unit or the course as a whole. Examples include mid-term exams and final papers or projects.

Grading

Grading is the act of quantifying your evaluation of student work. Individual assignments can be graded, and at the end of the semester, you give your students a grade by entering it into your roster on CUNYFirst.

See this document for “CUNY’s Uniform Grade Glossary, Policies, and Guidelines”.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the process of measuring work against a standard, whether that standard is determined externally, collectively within the community of the class, or somewhere in-between. Evaluation can be quantitative in nature—a letter or a number grade—and/or it can be qualitative. It is most often, though not always, connected to acts of summative assessment.  

Feedback

Feedback is the qualitative evaluation given on work that’s either in progress or has been completed. The most effective feedback is formative, as it helps the student whose work is being evaluated reflect and imagine ways to continue to improve or refine their work going forward.

Getting Started with Evaluating Student Work

Understanding the different modes available to you as a college teacher when you evaluate work is necessary in order to grade and to give purposeful feedback. It’s important to understand and to articulate what you’re looking for from your students, and also how you want them to interact with your feedback. In some academic programs—such as nursing, pre-med, or accountancy— courses tend to prepare students for external certifications, during which they will be measured against standards over which faculty and students do not have much say (if any at all). In other courses—such as creative writing, or seminar or capstone courses—you and your students may have complete autonomy to define how grading happens. And many courses exist between those ends of the spectrum, combining pursuit of standards articulated by the program or department with those identified by the faculty member, perhaps in dialogue with their students.  

Some faculty begin with the learning goals that they’ve designed or inherited for their course, consider what kinds of skills students might practice to pursue those goals, and then ask how students will ultimately demonstrate what they’ve learned. Others grade the way that they were graded as students, presuming that’s just the way it’s supposed to be done. Some ask their students to determine how they would prefer to be evaluated, and enter into contracts with students over how grades for the course will ultimately be determined.

Whatever your approach, it’s important to determine what agency you have within the process, and how you want to use that privilege and authority to further your goals as an educator. It’s important to account for the various contexts in which we teach—as laid out by this Handbook’s Principles—and to make our choices with intentionality.

What is Your Overall Approach to Grading?

One first step you need to decide is your overall approach to grading. Two commonly used approaches are standards-based grading and ungrading.

Standards-based Grading

In most classes, instructors use some type of standards-based grading, where they allocate a certain percentage or number of points to each assignment they are grading and align the assignments with the standards or learning outcomes for the course. There are a variety of ways to identify and articulate standards, which can come from larger accreditation agencies, your department and discipline, your own standards as an instructor, or possibly standards you determine with your students. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss ways to determine learning outcomes for your course and to imagine design assignments that align with those learning outcomes. Of course, it’s always worth examining where these standards come from, and being aware of your own biases as an instructor about which standards and learning outcomes are most important.

In some cases, your evaluation will align with standards that have right/wrong answers. In these cases, professors often just give credit for a correct answer and take off points for incorrect answers, as is typically done on multiple choice exams. It’s important to consider the pedagogical value of such an approach, and to keep in mind the purpose of the assessment. It’s plausible that students will learn from getting the wrong answer; but it’s also possible that prioritizing “right” and “wrong” answers within students’ experience of a course can deemphasize learning as a process of growth and discovery. These questions are all heavily dependent upon disciplinary norms, but they also can be reflective of your values and commitments as an instructor and scholar.

Grading Rubrics

For more in-depth assignments and projects, instructors often break down the overall percentage/points using either checklists or rubrics. Rubrics can break down the expectations and aspirations for an assignment into categories and help students complete it with those specific categories in mind. They often resemble a grid or a chart with the skill listed in one column, and a qualitative evaluation of that skill indicated in rows (or vice versa). Some rubrics include detailed descriptions of expectations for each category, while others indicate level of competency. They offer instructors the opportunity to check how well students have acquired and can demonstrate targeted skill areas, and can be helpful to students as they plan their approach to an assignment.

Below is a sample blank rubric. Feel free to download and modify this Google Sheet. Note that the number of criteria and levels will vary depending on the assignment.

Rubrics can save instructors grading time since they offer a way to communicate beyond the prompt, marginal comments, and line edits. Further, rubrics take subjects or assignments such as oral presentations and essays that are frequently seen as “overly subjective” and make visible the rationale behind a grade. Rubrics also support effective evaluation in that they help the instructor point to specific elements or skills for the student to work on. They can help debunk a student's potential feeling that "I'm not good at this" or "I can't do this."

For instructors, the process of generating a rubric will help you articulate clear expectations and targets for the assignment, and will also give you a way to “proof” your review of the prompt. For students, rubrics not only supplement the directions and requirements of the assignment, but also frame those expectations in a different format. You can refer to the rubric during class when you’re working on a particular skill that relates directly to what students will be asked to do in the assignment.

You might consider involving your students in co-designing a rubric for an assignment. Students feel a sense of agency and investment when they participate in creating course policies and assessment criteria. Ask them what they see as the most important criteria for the assignment. How much agreement or disagreement is there among the class? You can decide how much you will arbitrate this process, but asking for input from your students can be a good strategy to ensure they understand and are comfortable with how they will be assessed.  

To generate your own rubric, think about what your assignment is designed to measure and what its objectives are. Make a list of components you want to see in the assignment and arrange the list in categories. Some things to consider when designing your rubric:

• List the skill categories in order of most to least important (heavily weighted to least in terms of grading).
• Be mindful of how many criteria both you and your students can keep track of.
• Return to your learning goals and incorporate that language into your rubric.
• Write out a description of what each evaluative category means both in terms of grade range and in terms of specific criteria. So, for example, a “proficient” thesis statement puts a student in x grade range and requires that the statement has certain elements.
• Test your rubric against the assignment instructions. Do they mesh? Does the assignment indicate the categories that appear on the rubric?
• Discourage your students from letting the rubric overdetermine their approach. You don’t want them to “write to the rubric,” but rather to use the rubric as a reference point for self-evaluation during the process of completing an assignment.  

There are many existing rubrics that you can take in full or modify for your classes; below are a few we find especially helpful:

• Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center has collected rubrics for a range of assignments including papers, projects and oral presentations.
• UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division’s Teaching and Resource Center has a list of sample rubrics for a range of disciplines.
• DePaul’s Teaching Commons gives examples and breaks down the advantages and disadvantages of different rubrics.
• This essay rubric was shared by Jade Davis, formerly of LaGuardia Community College and Columbia University, now at the University of Pennsylvania.
• A rubric designed by students specifically for participation was shared by Kaitlin Mondello, formerly of the Teaching and Learning Center, and now at Millersville University.

Checklists

Some instructors and students find rubrics overwhelming. Another way to be transparent with students about how you are grading something is to provide a checklist. Similar to rubrics, checklists break down the categories in an assignment and allocate a certain percentage or points to each category. Checklists work best for assignments where students have to include a variety of required components to successfully complete the assignment.

Ungrading and Contract-Based Grading

Many scholars feel that grades play a negative role in our efforts to help students grow as learners, and eschew issuing grades or participating in formal assessment altogether. Some feel that efforts to rank students or to measure them against each other or external standards condition both teacher and students to feel that learning is fixed, unidirectional, or competitive rather than messy, complex, and supported by social contexts. Efforts to imagine alternative approaches to assessment fall under the broad category of “ungrading,” and date back nearly half a century. These approaches have been explored recently in the collection of essays Ungrading, by Susan Bloom, including essays by multiple scholars with connections to CUNY.

At CUNY, all students must receive a grade in order to receive credit for the class. But faculty can explore ungrading approaches by, among other things,

• Grade less stuff, grade less often, grade more simply: Create space for discovery and experimentation. Use a grading scale that feels less arbitrary. Ask students to do work that you don't "collect." Grade less high stakes assignments.
• Change how you talk about evaluation and assessments: Use words like "ask" or "invite," rather than "submit" or "required." Ask students about their expectations for their work, rather than centering yours and invite students to a conversation about grades by asking students how being graded makes them feel, how it affects their motivation.
• Ask students to reflect on their own learning: Even if you change nothing else about how you grade, ask students when and how they learn. Ask what barriers they face. Listen. Believe the answers.
• Have students develop an individual plan: Have students figure out how a class fits with their own lives, course of study and interests. Try to meet with every student to talk through preparedness, what they are eager to learn or do, and what causes apprehension.
• Encourage self-evaluation: Have students develop honest standards and self-scrutiny. Ask students’ to complete a written self-assessment of their work with assignments.
• Emphasize the entire portfolio and revision: Engage in activities, reflection, conversation, writing, and wondering throughout the semester. End the semester with a portfolio conference. The goal is to show them their learning, by comparing their early and later understanding, a chance to review the material and suggest their own grade. Instead of having 1-2 high stakes assignments, try to give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning. Offer students multiple opportunities for revising what they’ve done and improving their grade.
• Invite students into the process of determining how they will be assessed: This can be done through contract grading or by co-constructing the grading policy for the class.

What does this actually look like in terms of how you structure assessment in your class? Ungrading can include any of the following forms of alternative assessment:

• Minimal Grading: Using scales with fewer gradations to make grading “simpler, fairer, clearer” (Elbow)
• Self-assessment & Process Letters: Asking students to reflect on their work and offer feedback on those reflections. Students help guide the grading of their own work.
• Authentic Assessment: Having students write for real-world audiences, focusing on their intrinsic motivations.
• Student-generated Assessment: drawing students into the design of assignments / assessments
• Labor-Based & Contract Grading: Grading contracts convey expectations about what is required for each potential grade. Students work toward the grade they want to achieve, and goalposts don’t unexpectedly shift.

Below are some resources and examples of syllabi if you want to think more about ungrading:

• Assessment: “Assessment Models” from Baruch College’s Center for Teaching and Learning - includes authentic assessment, low-stakes assessment, student self-assessment, peer review, and portfolio assessment
• Examples of various approaches to grading/assessment:

• Minimal grading with points system: Seslow, Digital Storytelling 
• Point system, with most assignments self-graded: Brandle, Intro to American Government. See syllabus here.
• Ungrading, with final grade determined through self-evaluation: Bailey, Survey of American Literature. See syllabus here
• Mix of feedback loops and points system: Abracht, English 200. See here for description of grading here.
• A math teacher's reflection on moving to ungrading (student’s self-reflected and determined their final grade) in two math/political science courses

• Contract Grading Examples:

• Inoue, Translingual Writing
• Elbow & Danielewicz, first year writing courses (longer article, with description of contract on page 2)
• Rajabzadeh, Visions of the World writing course
• Talbert, Computer science/math course (note: this is a mix of contract grading and competency based grading)

It’s important for newer faculty to know, however, that more senior faculty at your campus may be skeptical of such approaches, since they challenge existing orthodoxy about schooling in the United States. If you decide to explore ungrading, make sure you have a sound rationale and explanation for doing so, one accessible both to your students and to administrators in your program. The TLC can help you think through how to do this wisely, given your specific teaching context.

Choosing What and How to Grade

Choosing what and how to grade is aligned with the assignments you create and ask students to complete. See Chapter Four for more on the content and type of assignments you might want to consider.

Quantity and Quality

Not every assignment needs to be graded nor needs to be high stakes. In fact, in-class and low-stakes work can give students the chance to experiment and try out new ideas. Low-stakes work should be based on participation and relative labor. Not all of your students will be able to meet the same standards, and not all will have the same level of comfortability with a topic or field. Participation or labor-based grading allows students to fail in a secure environment where they don’t have to worry about how the assignment fits into their overall GPA.

Competition vs Collaboration

Often, grading leads to a competitive environment that can add undue stress to students. You can encourage a more collaborative classroom by introducing more participation-based group work measuring progress based on contribution to the team.

Course Goals and Scaffolding

The course or learning goals are the most important take-aways from a class, and when grading, these are the standards to which students should be held, but it is often unrealistic to think every activity should be formally assessed. Here are a few things to think about when deciding if and what to grade:

• Has the material been covered yet or is it new?
• Have the students had a chance to practice their skills yet?
• How important is the assignment to the overall learning goals?
• Will grading affect how and if students learn the material?

Setting Up a Gradebook

Before the semester starts, take some time to figure out how you’ll organize your gradebook.

• Will you keep grades by hand?
• Will you use a spreadsheet?
• Will you grade on an online platform such as Blackboard?

As you’re setting up your gradebook, keep in mind that students will likely ask you how they are doing in the class during the course of the semester. It will be helpful to you if your grades are in an easy-to-manage space so that you can access current grade information for students.

Colleges vary in terms of how long students have the right to dispute their grades. Be sure that you know your school’s grade change policy. In the event a student initiates a grade dispute, it’s important that you have the necessary documentation to support the given grade. Students may come to you a semester, a year, or even a couple of years after you’ve had them in your class. You’ll likely have engaged with dozens or hundreds of students since then, and the records you keep will be helpful in refreshing your memory.  

Taking a few minutes to write up some notes after you’ve graded each assignment or taught each class and unit to reflect on what went well (and what didn’t), where students struggled, and how long it took you to mark or prepare can be a helpful tool for revising your class after the semester and balancing your workload.

Feedback

One of the biggest frustrations for instructors is spending hours marking papers with detailed comments, only to see students immediately drop them, unexamined, into the depths of an overstuffed backpack. If you want students to review and implement the feedback you’re giving them, it’s helpful to build a step into the assignment that asks students to engage with previous feedback. For example, you can ask students to write a cover letter for a subsequent draft addressing how they incorporated prior feedback. Another strategy you might try is giving your formative feedback and the grade for the assignment separately so that students focus less on the outcome, and more on the process of learning.

Giving feedback as an instructor, particularly an adjunct with limited amounts of time, can feel overwhelming. Below are some strategies that might help.

Minimal Marking

When it comes to feedback, more is not necessarily better. Research suggests that students often benefit from an approach called “minimal marking,” in which instructors refrain from correcting students’ superficial errors, and direct them instead to find and correct those errors themselves. Instructors focus on crafting a global comment that identifies what the students’ work is doing, and doing well, and then notes a few specific areas for revision.

Appropriately-Timed Feedback

If the project is scaffolded, or built gradually, feedback may be more useful during the course of a project than at the conclusion. If the kind of assignment will be repeated, then you might want to give the students a few comments about how to adjust their initial approach to the assignment in order to more directly align with what you hope to see the next time.

Collective Feedback

If several students are facing similar challenges on an assignment, rather than writing comments to each of them, you might take a few minutes in the next class to explain common missteps, perhaps with an example, or post a model response online so that students have a better idea of what you are seeking. If the assignment will lead directly into another one, you might offer comments to help the student bridge the two: what do they need to do in order to strengthen their work for the next benchmark in the sequence?

Proportionate Feedback

Consider the stakes of the assignment and adjust the effort you spend grading to match.

If it’s a low-stakes task, then your assessment method should also be relatively brief and “low-stakes.” Consider a check +/- approach, and record that the student has completed the work. Ultimately, foreground what you want to see the student accomplish through the assignment, and mark accordingly.

Feedback Towards Revision

Allow students to revise the papers they submit, so that you can design your comments with a specific purpose in mind. That way, students see your feedback as a step in a process—rather than a “postmortem” on a final product which they may never have an opportunity to revisit.

Higher Order Feedback

When giving feedback on writing, focus on “higher-order” concerns—like a paper’s ideas and organization—before turning to “lower-order” ones, like sentence errors. It’s often the case that lower-order issues improve once higher-order concerns are addressed.  

Heuristic Feedback

Instead of marking students’ sentence-level errors, make check marks next to the sentences that include them—then direct students to find and fix the errors themselves. Additionally, or alternatively, you could edit a single paragraph in the paper, as a model for the kinds of editing you are expecting students to do for themselves before they submit their work.

Spot Checking

If, for example, you assign a set of math problems, you might choose to spot-check five out of twenty, or you might check all of them and simply mark them as correct or incorrect, or you might highlight the line in the work where the solution goes astray, etc. Each option requires a time commitment on your end, and it’s important to determine if that time will be well spent. If you want to mark where the problem goes astray, are you planning on asking the student to rework the problem? If you spot-check five questions, will you ask students to check their other answers against solutions you post?

Readerly Feedback

Make the marginal comments you provide “readerly”—that is, use them to note where you, as a reader, get confused, or need additional examples or clarity.

Summing Up

Construct your final comment using this 3-step template: (1) strengths, (2) summary of a limited number of problems, and (3) recommendations for revision.

Peer and Self-Evaluation

You do not need to be your students’ only source of formal and informal feedback on assignments. Having students evaluate their own work or their peers’ is both a time-saving strategy and beneficial to their learning, as effective peer and self-evaluation are skills that carry across multiple disciplines and are also often applicable in professional settings. To facilitate peer and self evaluation, it’s important to provide clear expectations and guidelines. Helping students give each other formative feedback can be a great way to distribute the process while also deepening and broadening student engagement with each other and with course material.

Peer Review

If you choose to make use of peer review, you can ask students to exchange papers, projects, or problem sets with each other and offer feedback, either during class or as a homework assignment.

Peer review is typically most effective when students have specific instructions and clear expectations. To this end, you might try the following strategies:  

• Instruct students to avoid evaluative language (such as “good” or “bad”) and ask them to describe what’s happening or where they get confused, etc. (See the notion of using “readerly” language above.)

• Similarly, you might direct students not to correct grammar (this will reassure students who feel unsure about their own grasp of grammar, and prevent overly-zealous students from introducing unneeded complexity into a peer’s work). Students often confuse revision (more global rewriting) with editing (making more local, sentence-level changes), so this approach provides an opportunity to clarify that difference.

• Ask students to treat the text or assignment they’re reviewing as they would treat any other text they encounter in your course, reading critically to identify its argument, understand how it uses evidence, and evaluate its clarity.  

• Give students specific elements to focus on in their feedback. For instance, ask them just to focus on a paper’s use of evidence, or its thesis statement, or its organization.

• Consider pairing an assignment rubric with peer review. Incorporating a rubric into peer review reinforces the target or focus areas for the assignment and offers students an opportunity to identify and evaluate the presence of those skills on the rubric in a peer’s writing before they return to their own.

• Share a worksheet with students which prompts them to do certain things with their peer’s draft (for instance, underline and restate the thesis statement as they understand it). This sheet can then be returned to the writer and used during revision.

• Have several students work on the same paper and compare notes so that they practice identifying rubric elements, and can ask any questions about them before revising.

• Incentivize the reviewer’s job by assigning points or a grade to the work. That said, students are often enthusiastic about helping their classmates strengthen their ideas and thinking without the pressure of a grade.

Student Self-Evaluation

Self-Assessment can encompass anything from filling in an assignment rubric as part of the drafting or revision process, to writing a letter reflecting upon the experience of completing the assignment, to asking students to collect, revise and arrange past assignments into a portfolio. If you’re asking students to evaluate their own work on a particular assignment, make sure you explain why you’re asking them to do so, and to what end. Structured self-assessment from students also helps make one-on-one meetings successful by helping students determine the areas where they want the most assistance. Effective self-assessment is one of several skills that span disciplines, and is also applicable in a wide range of jobs students might hold outside of or beyond school.

In particular, you might ask students to:

• Generate or complete a self-assessment sheet to accompany an assignment (see http://cuny.is/assignmentassess for one you might adapt).

• Write out the three or four points that they want feedback on from you.

• Highlight a few objectives and ask students to evaluate how successfully they accomplished the task (making sure you define what would qualify as “successful”).

• Think through the assignment in relation to the course objectives and identify what skills or knowledge they gained in relation to the expectations of the course.

• Develop a “mini-rubric” that works in conjunction with other rubrics for the class which articulates what they hope to get out of the assignment, or what they hope to accomplish beyond the stated requirements. These mini-rubrics can help students make additional connections between assignments and their previous learning, and encourage them to articulate their own learning goals.