Effective Grading

Many students complain that grading is arbitrary, inconsistent, and unfair. Meanwhile, many instructors grumble about grade inflation, the excessive amount of time devoted to grading, and the many complaints that grading prompts.

One way to ensure consistency in grading and to reduce student complaints is to construct and use grading rubrics. A rubric specifies the criteria used to evaluate a student's performance. It divides an assignment into a variety of component parts and objectives, and provides a detailed description of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable levels of performance in each dimension.

A rubric provides students with a clear guide to how their work will be assessed. By spelling out evaluative criteria, a rubric greatly reduces subjectivity in grading and makes the grading process more transparent.

In constructing a grading rubric, an instructor must think systematically about a course's objectives and the skills and content a student is expected to master. The first step involves establishing a set of evaluative criteria, such as clarity of expression, command of the course material, and quality of argumentation. By reading through the papers or examinations quickly, the instructor can get a sense of what constitutes high quality, given the time constraints that the students were working under.

The second step is to read the assignments more carefully, appending comments that help students understand their strengths and weaknesses. A rubric will help you identify those strengths and weaknesses. Here is an example of the criteria that might be found in a rubric in a humanities course. Each category would then be evaluated in terms of the extent to which the student has met the rubric.

Criteria
Mechanics	Spelling Punctuation Grammar
Quality of Writing	Persuasiveness Clarity Structure
Research	Accuracy Thoroughness
Quality of Content & Analysis	Originality Sophistication of analysis