What's the Point of Grading?

At this point in the semester, when we’re slogging through stacks of papers and projects, it’s easy to lose sight of the purpose of grading. It’s not, in fact, to make ourselves and our students suffer. Our students’ final work should provide evidence of the learning they’ve done with us this fall. Students who have mastered the material at the appropriate level should do well.

Our top two concerns right now are keeping our grading aligned with the course goals and using our time efficiently. A good rubric or set of specifications helps on both counts. In order to develop such tools, we need a clear sense of what students should know or be able to do, and our priorities for their learning. What was the instructional purpose of the assignment? What is the exam meant to measure? There’s no need to comment on, or assign weight to, issues that are not explicitly part of the goals. Since students can no longer revise, and many don’t see or review our comments on their final projects, now is not the time to expend hours and energy crafting the sort of careful facilitative feedback that guides learning. Students need such feedback earlier in the semester, when they can use it to improve—now, at the end, what they need is transparency in our evaluation of their performance.

It’s always disappointing if the work our students submit doesn’t show the evidence of learning and accomplishment we were expecting. Sometimes that means our assessments weren’t well-aligned measures of their learning. It might be that students don’t have great metacognitive strategies, or they pulled too many all-nighters cramming for finals.

If you’re finding yourself tempted to grade on a forced curve, or besieged by last-minute requests for extra credit, it’s important to calibrate your response so that final grades reflect, as far as possible, how much students have learned. If students have mastered the material, but earned very poor grades, you may need to adjust your grading scale. Conversely, if high grades don’t seem to align with the level of mastery you’d like to see, you’ll also probably want to redesign your grading structure, exams, or assignments in the future.