14 How Do I Grade?

Kurt loved everything about his teaching job except grading. No matter what he did, Kurt never felt like he could please everyone with his grades. If he graded too hard, his students and their parents complained. If his grading was too easy, his colleagues complained because they caught more flak for grading hard. If he spread his grades out all the way along the grading curve, students who received low grades complained. If he compressed his grades into one or two levels somewhere in the middle or even toward the top, students who outperformed their peers complained at not getting the higher grade that they earned. Kurt seemed to catch flak whether he was an easy or hard grader, or bunched grades or spread them out along a curve, when all he wanted to do was keep folks reasonably happy.

Grades

Schools use grades for several sound reasons. Grades are, first of all, a way of providing for the meaningful advancement of students through the school’s instructional program. Although some schools do, schools should generally not simply pass students on from one course to the next, and from one grade or level to the next, without certifying that they have gained the requisite knowledge, skills, and ethics. Otherwise, the school’s diploma, degree, or certificate may be relatively meaningless as a qualifying credential. Graduates from such questionable programs, without relatively rigorous grading, should not expect welcome admission into the next-level educational program or ready hiring for employment. Grades, if based on reliable and valid assessments, can also sort students by degree of competence and by their quality and quantity of learning. Higher grades and the academic honors that go with them may mean scholarships, preferred school admissions, or preferred employment. Appreciate the interest of your school and students in the fairness and rigor of your grading.

Incentives

Grades can also serve as significant incentives for students. As the prior chapter suggested in its discussion of the procrastination curve, some students will strive simply to earn a better grade. They may do so because of their naturally competitive nature to get good grades, to maintain their reputation as a disciplined performer, or simply to keep their cumulative grade-point average above the required minimum to stay in school. Students may also strive for better grades because of expectations and incentives their parents, relatives, mentors, scholarship grantors, lenders, or other acquaintances impose. Whatever their external reason or internal psychological need for pursuing better grades, students may respond to your well-constructed incentives. You and your students should generally prefer internal motivation, for students simply to explore interesting subjects and grow intellectually, over external motivation to get better grades for scholarships, awards, and preferred employment or school admissions. Yet the more fairness, transparency, and objectivity you can offer in your grading practices, the more you and your students will be able to draw on whatever incentive grades supply to improve student learning.

Accountability

Grading, though, is the bane of some teachers, especially those who cannot articulate the basis for their grading and defend that basis consistent with their school’s mission. Grading means accountability, not just for students but also for teachers. Of course, students whose failing grades require them to repeat a course, get them held back from advancement, or get them dismissed from school or sent to an alternative disciplinary program, face clear accountability for their ineffective learning. But teachers who fail a disproportionate percentage of students, especially students who succeed in other courses, can also face accountability. Teacher accountability for grading can come not just from students and their parents or other advocates but also from department chairs, principals, deans, or other administrators who need and want to see students pass, advance, and graduate. Indeed, administrators can face significantly greater challenges over student failures, having to do with enrollment, retention, accreditation, alumni relations, academic reputation, and the like, than the teacher who fails the student. You are accountable for your grading to multiple influential constituents. Make your grading one of your best teaching practices.

Scoring

A good first step in your grading practice is to distinguish scoring from grading. Scoring involves assigning numeric values to student summative assessments. You may, for instance, score several different parts of a single student’s summative assessment, each part in a different test format, before adding up the student’s total assessment score. You may also score a single student’s multiple summative assessments across a term, each in a different format, before adding up the assessment scores for a final student score for the term. That scoring, though, says nothing definitive yet about the grade you will assign to the student based on the total score and any other adjustments you might make to the score, outside of the immediate terms of the scoring. Teachers typically have complete control over their method of scoring because scoring is simply their way of arriving, one hopes systematically, fairly, and rationally, at a final number to which to assign a grade.

System

Design and deploy a scoring system with which you are most comfortable, that students can understand and appreciate, and that you can defend to any constituent raising a challenge. As the prior chapter suggested, you may help students defeat the procrastination curve by scoring several assessments across the term, counting toward the final score, rather than only a single final assessment. If so, then consider using round, sensible numbers for your scoring that do not require substantial calculation and interpretation. For instance, if you use three tests each worth twenty percent of a final grade plus a final exam worth forty percent of the final grade, then consider assigning twenty points for each test and forty points for the final exam. Students will then easily be able to translate their scores into meaningful progress toward an acceptable final grade. You can then allocate the points available for each test and the final exam to individual items or parts within each test and the final exam. If you need more points for a more sensitive measure or more tests or test items, then consider doubling the total number of points, again to keep the numbers round, clear, and easily related. Simplicity and transparency in scoring can help with explaining and justifying grades, while ensuring appropriate student incentive.

Rubrics

Scoring each test, exam, or assignment depends on the test-item format, whether, for instance, multiple choice, true/false, or essay questions. Plainly objective questions in multiple choice, true/false, and similar formats you may readily score with a point or appropriate fraction of a point for correct answers, depending on the number of questions and the total points available for the test. For essay questions, though, you should create a scoring rubric that objectifies the components of a complete and accurate essay answer. See the example scoring rubric in the appendix at the end of this guide. Don’t let subjectivity enter into the equation when scoring essay answers. Objectifying your scoring of essay answers or other complex assessments can not only increase their validity, reliability, and fairness but also speed your scoring. If you know what you are looking for in an essay answer, you’ll quickly find it present or absent. More significantly, though, you can share with students clear scoring rubrics for practice exams, well in advance of the scored exam, and completed rubrics scoring their summative tests and exams. Your rubrics can, in other words, be teaching tools, helping you communicate to students the structure and content of sound essay answers, before and after exams.

Grading

Grading, by contrast, involves the teacher awarding the institution’s final letter or numeric score, reflecting the institution’s grade definitions and conditions for advancement. Assigning the institution’s grades to your total student scores involves a different overall process and consideration than your direct scoring of assessments. Your scoring of assessments involved evaluating the accuracy, comprehensiveness, or other quality of student answers. By contrast, your assigning of grades involves applying the institution’s grade definitions to each student’s total score. Your school or department should have some definition for grades. The definitions may be general, such as excellent, good, average, below average, and failing. Or the definitions may be more specific. A professional program, for instance, may define the top-level grade as constituting the competence of an experienced practitioner in the field and lower grades as the competence of a qualified novice, unqualified novice, and incompetent trainee. Examine your institution’s grade definitions closely, and apply them as you best discern.

Scales

Your school will also define the grading scales. Grading scales at different schools can have more permutations than you might assume. A standard scale might be letter grades of A, B, C, D, and F, one hopes each with their own definition. Other common scales, though, may add minus grades to the A, B, and C grades, plus grades to the A, B, C, and D grades, or plus and minus grades in between the A, B, C, and D grades, among other options. Some schools forgo letters and use equivalent numbers, typically on a four-point scale, so that an A grade might be 4.00, B grade a 3.00, C grade a 2.00, and D grade a 1.00, with plus and minus grades assigned fractions in between. Schools using letter grades likewise typically convert the letter grades to equivalent numbers on a four-point or five-point scale, although schools can differ on the numeric value assigned to plus or minus letter grades. Some schools only award pass/fail grades for certain courses, simplifying your assignment of grades to a single cut off score between passing and failing. Familiarize yourself with your school’s grading scales. The school registrar or other administrative official to whom you submit your grades will require that they be in the school’s form.

Cutoffs

You, as the teacher in the course, are responsible for assigning the letter or numeric final grades to your students based on their total scores. Your job, then, is to assign cutoffs between grade levels. If, for instance, your total possible score for the course was 100 points, you might assign 95 points as the A grade cutoff, 90 points as the A-minus grade cutoff, 85 as the B grade cutoff, 80 as the B-minus grade cutoff, and so on down in equal five-point intervals. As simple as that equating process sounds, assigning cutoffs is both art and science, and more significant, subtle, and complex than you may think. Students reasonably expect to see equal or roughly equal intervals between cutoffs, such as the five-point intervals in the above example. Otherwise, they may claim that you arbitrarily assigned or moved a cutoff line, intentionally or unintentionally penalizing them in their assigned grade. For example, if your grade intervals spanned five points everywhere except one cutoff spanning just two or three points, students assigned grades just below that smaller cutoff may complain to you or to your department chair or other teaching supervisor that your non-standard cutoff arbitrarily or intentionally penalized them. Avoid arbitrary-looking cutoffs. Try to keep your intervals equal, or if not equal, then gradually decreasing or increasing, potentially with wider intervals at the bottom and top.

Distributions

Once you assign grade cutoffs, so that your student scores equate well with the school’s grade definitions, you should still examine the distribution of grades. Unusual clumping, tilting, or other anomalous distributions of grades can happen, even with the best of integrity in your scoring or grading. You may, for instance, have had a superior class in which more than half the class gets an A grade. You may alternatively have had an inferior class in which more than half the class gets a C or lower grade. But in either case, you may have to justify, to the registrar, your department chair, or others, your abnormal distribution of grades. Be prepared to do so, based on the integrity of your teaching, testing, scoring, and assignment of grades. Have the sound process and documentation to back up your grading. Resist, though, defaulting to “curving” grades into a normal distribution, simply to avoid scrutiny. While schools and their administrators may expect to see a normal curve of grades, because curves are in fact normal, deliberately curving grades can unduly penalize or unduly reward students. To put it another way, when you deliberately curve grades, you distort the integrity of your instructional objectives, instruction, and assessment, and the incentives of students.

Criteria

The prior paragraph introduces the debate between norm-referenced grading and criterion-referenced grading. Norming grades introduces competition among students for the relatively rarer higher grades at the top end of the bell curve and to avoid the equally rare but still devastating lower grades at the bottom end of the bell curve. Schools that strictly norm-reference grades will award a few high grades but will also insist on awarding a few low grades, when student performance may not have justified one or warranted the other. Norming grades may increase competitive incentives at the top end but also create anxiety over undue failure for students at the lower end. What’s the fairness of someone having to fail, if all students perform competently? By contrast, criterion-referenced grading awards students what they earned. Yet criterion-referenced grading can produce larger swings in grading either toward the top end, reducing competitive incentives, or toward the lower end, increasing the risk of failure. In practice, the most-sensitive graders may use a subtle mix of norm-referenced and criterion-referenced grading, to hold mostly true to the integrity of criterion-referenced grading while reflecting just enough norm-referenced grading to soften anomalous distributions. Teachers may take years to grasp grading’s subtlety.

Appeals

Given all that students can have at stake in grading, schools commonly offer some form of grade appeal to students who believe that their grade did not accurately represent the quality of their academic work. Grade-appeal systems must balance the authority and competence of the teacher to evaluate student performance, with the interest of the student in avoiding subjective, arbitrary, mistaken, or unduly punitive grading. Teachers may have little more involvement in grade appeals than to supply to another authority, such as a dean, principal, or appeals committee, the disputed exam, assignment, answer, and scoring system and rubric supporting their grading decision. But that’s exactly where you will find the quality and integrity of your assessment practices either endorsed or exposed. Do the good assessment design up front so that you don’t have to justify questionable results on the back side. Appreciate the impact that your grading can have on students and on your colleagues and school. Use best scoring and grading practices.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how confident are you in your scoring and grading? What investigation might you undertake and measures might you adopt to improve your confidence with better practices? Does your scoring and grading promote or discourage student striving? Can you alter your scoring and grading practices to incentivize and encourage greater student striving? Is your scoring system clear and simple enough for students to readily understand where they stand relative to a final grade? Do you assign and allocate scores in a balanced fashion across multiple assessments? Do you use well-designed rubrics to score assessments that involve a significant degree of evaluation and interpretation? Do you share practice assessments and rubrics with students before their summative assessments? Can students examine their rubrics after you score their summative assessments, to see what they did well and poorly? Do you assign grades according to your school’s grade definitions? Do you use criterion-referenced grading or norm-referenced grading when assigning and adjusting grades? Are your grade cutoffs reasonably consistent so as to make your grading appear rational rather than arbitrary?

Key Points

Grading is a critical institutional function concluding assessment.
Grades can serve as significant incentives for students to strive.
Grades hold both student and teacher accountable to constituents.
Use a well-designed and rational process for scoring student work.
Assign and allocate numeric scores rationally across assessments.
Use clear and objectified rubrics to score essay questions and answers.
Assign grades to total scores, based on your school’s grade definitions.
Follow your school’s grading scale as the registrar requires.
Examine and adjust grade distributions without substantial norming.
Prefer criterion-referenced grading over norm-referenced grading.
Grade appeals may test the integrity of your scoring and grading.

Read Chapter 15.