Assessment Ideas
Eleven Commandments for Successful Grading
1. Don’t assign what you can’t grade.
2. Plan grading time into your weekly schedule rather than waiting until weekends
3. As you plan for the semester, plan the assignment and exams you give based on when you can create blocks of time to grade them quickly.
4. Schedule 80% of you work in the first 60% of the course. The first assignments in a course are often knowledge and understanding based. Towards the end of the course, the assignments can focus on analysis, synthesis, and evaluation and be more reflective in nature.
5. Use oral in-class assessments instead of student written assessments whenever possible.
6. Stagger major assignments (especially those with an oral presentation component) over a period of several weeks so you don’t have to grade them all at once
7. Consider having major assignment turned in in “chunks”. This allows the professor to be engaged in the creation of the product as well as the final evaluation of the product, usually resulting in higher quality student work and the grading is spread out over weeks instead of days.
8. Grade for tightly focused criteria on assignments to limit the scope of your grading. Rubrics (well written ones) are the single most helpful tool for a professor to cope with the quantity of grading. Rubrics can cut down the amount of time spent on an assignment by more than half
9. Have maximum as well as minimum lengths for assignments
10. Decide which of your assignment require APA style and which do not and then limit the number of APA assignments
11. Create assignments and exams based on higher order thinking rather than information. This shortens the length of the assignment but increases assessment of significant learning objectives. Higher order thinking is evidence of knowledge and understanding and so a brief analysis question can replace a long knowledge or understanding question.
Eleven Tips for grading
1. Grade in small pieces. We are more efficient when we grade ten papers in thirty minutes and do this three times over several hours than when we try to keep at it for ninety consecutive minutes.
2. Grade during the “down” times of our lives. Waiting for the car to be repaired or while your spouse is shopping or you are waiting for a friend. Always have a set of papers with you.
3. Grade in a alternative location. Offices and homes are the worst place to grade (distractions, phones, interruptions destroy efficiency) Coffee shops, parks, libraries are the best.
4. Assign only written work that is necessary to insure that you know that they have learned the content and concepts. If you want them to do more “work”, find a way for them to do it, not you.
5. Create assignments so that students will be successful. Nothing grades slower than ten bad papers in a row.
6. You do not have to mark every error on every page. You are a professor, not an editor.
7. If you can’t grade it, don’t assign it.
8. Give lots of little assignments rather than a few big ones. (Little assignments can be the “chunks” of major assignments, if a major assignment is necessary.)
9. Take home exams are always longer than in class exams and they tell us less about student’s ability to think.
10. Give students assignments that you might be interesting reading. (Examples: narratives and opinion pieces are always more interesting than reports and reviews.)
11. Handing back papers promptly is also good for professors. “Old” papers are not as interesting to grade as current ones. Papers that are long overdue no longer have a connection to current class learning and therefore we are not as interested in student contributions about topic that we finished in class days (or weeks?) ago.
Surviving the Grading Ordeal
Eleven questions to consider regarding assignments and tests/exams
1. How many assignments and/or tests should a professor require for a three hour course?
2. How much time should we expect that a student devote to a particular assignment or test
3. How many pages are appropriate for a specific type of assignment or test?
4. What is the learning purpose or objective of specific assignments/tests?
5. How much is too much/how much is too little?
6. Can assignments become repetitive exercises for students in which they are going though the motions of “writing a paper” but the mind is not truly engaged?
7. What are the standards for a quality assignment?
8. What are the standards for a quality test?
9. Can one essay question (instead of two or three) give you the necessary data to determine the learning progress of a student?
10. Can the learning objectives that need to be assessed be done as easily with an objective test as with an essay test?
11. Can we carefully decide before giving and assignment or test exactly what we are looking for in the student work that will inform us of their learning so that we can efficiently grade for specific objective met rather that attempted to evaluate the entire assignment/test as a literary/academic work.
And, can we share those objectives with the students so that they have a clear sense of what the expectations are so that they are not “trying to hit a moving target”?
