Grading Strategies

After working through the content and reflective activities presented on this site, you will be able to:

Articulate the role of grading in your pedagogical and assessment processes.
Choose efficient grading strategies that provide relevant feedback to students.
Distinguish between rubric types and construct rubrics to support grading.
Use Moodle tools when grading.

Why do we grade student work?

Grading is a process that is often taken for granted in academic environments. Like many other teaching practices, it is easy to imitate the grading practices we experienced as students. Many faculty feel overwhelmed by the role of grading in our roles, and perhaps even experience grading as something that distracts from the joy of teaching.

Grades may serve several purposes:

to evaluate student work
to communicate to students, other academic institutions, and employers about a student’s competencies
to provide feedback to students about their mastery of course learning objectives
to provide feedback to instructors about students’ learning in the course (Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, 2022; Walvoord & Anderson, 1998)

Before reviewing specific grading strategies, it may be helpful to step back and consider the “why” of grading, and its place in the overall teaching and learning process. Often, we focus most strongly on the feedback/evaluation components of grading, and less on the role of grading in supporting student learning.

Consider how you currently view grading, and how it interacts with your broader philosophy of teaching and learning. Use the questions to the right to guide your journey.

References:

Walvoord, B. & V. Anderson (1998). Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.