Grade expectations

My G.I.F.T.S. presentation covered students & grading & ownership. Last semester, I tried something new - thanks to some great ideas about student self-assessment from Tim Langen - and it worked.

My idea is that when I create an essay assignment, I also create the grading rubric, using the same language whenever possible, i.e. Catch the reader's attention in the first two sentences of the introduction becomes, on the rubric, Did the essay catch the reader's attention in the first two sentences? I want the expectations to match the assessment.

Students (ideally) use this grading rubric in their writing process activities. Then, before submitting the essays to me to be graded, they complete the rubrics themselves, evaluating their writing. When I then grade the work, I mark on the same rubrics. When I see a discrepancy between their self-scores and my scores, I know that I need to provide specific feedback.

So far it's been working well, and I feel that students have a better sense of what I expect and a better sense of their roles in earning the grades.

You can imagine, then, that I was excited to see this article on student expectations of grades. The article quotes James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, as saying, “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

Now that I've attended this Emotional Intelligence seminar, I see, too, how connected our grade expectations are to our self-images. I find it tricky to walk the line between upholding grade integrity (anti-grade inflation) and encouraging vulnerable students. The balance comes in the kinds of comments I write. Better comments are more instructive to students and explain why problem areas are marked or points given are low. Of course, high-quality comments take time. Hence my grading cave.

I'm not complaining, however. I am truly, truly lucky to have my job with its hours, its variety, its proximity to where I live. The quest, however, to increase my grading efficiency and effectiveness is neverending.

I'm curious if any of you can remember a painful or positive grading experience from your academic years. Did you ever actually learn anything from those margin notes that instructors write?

When I received a B on a truly enormous Scott Fitzgerald bibliography assignment (the first big, big paper in my graduate program, the one where I had to create an annotated bibiliography of all critical work about Fitzgerald), I realized that I had to be an even better student at the graduate level. I certainly put in the time on that assignment, and really waded into the relatively new world wide web to gather information, but the final 50+ page paper wasn't flawless. The B meant above average but not outstanding. Upon further reflection, I realized she was correct in the grade she assigned me although I was disappointed at the time. I was also puzzled, since she did not provide comments explaining the grade. There were margin notes, but nothing at the end of the paper next to the circled grade.