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Grading Best Practices

Grading student work serves two primary purposes:

  • Giving students a score that corresponds with the quality and/or correctness of their work.
  • Giving students feedback on their work and how they can improve or correct their understanding.

Without effective and timely grading, students don't receive feedback on how they are doing, how to improve, and lack meaningful feedback on their learning. Here are some suggestions for effective grading for both faculty and TAs:

For Faculty

Communication with Graders

It's important to hold regular meetings / conversations with course TAs and graders in order to:

  • Communicate your grading philosophy and policies.
  • Outline the type of feedback you feel students should get and in what timeline.
  • Reiterate the collaboration and AI use policies and make sure everyone knows how to report suspected violations.
  • Point out particular common mistakes and misconceptions that TAs and graders should look for and help students avoid and learn from.
  • Establish a policy and workflow for regrade requests.
  • Communicate your late policy and establish a workflow for extensions requests and the handling of work turned in late.

For TAs

Course Policies

Make sure that you understand the course's policies at the beginning of the course; this will save you much time and pain over the long run. Some important things to cover are:

  • Who sets the grading policies? These include subjects like how many points each problem is worth, how much should be taken off for mistakes, what penalties apply to late work, and (more and more often) what computer programs students can use to work on their homework sets. If these things are left to your discretion, it is a good idea to talk to the other TAs and set a course policy, which you can then explain to the students.
  • What is the course policy regarding work done after a test's official time limit? Many tests at Caltech are given as timed, take‐home assessments, so it is not uncommon to find a notation indicating at what point a student ran out of time, followed by answers to the last few questions.

Solution Keys

You should work out the problem(s) or perform the lab(s) you are grading before you even look at the key and certainly before you begin leaving comments on students' work. Review the key carefully and decide how you will take points off for mistakes on each problem. Try to provide corrections in terms the students are familiar with and that are consistent with lectures or pre‐lab meetings. Make sure to leave feedback whenever you take points off, so students know why they had points deducted. (Gradescope allows feedback comments to be reused from student to student.)

Consistent Grading

Consistency in grading is always important, but it is especially difficult to achieve in a large course.

  • If the grading is divided among many TAs, you should meet with each other and design a grading scheme (a.k.a. rubric) that everyone can follow. Grading by a scheme and keeping track of it will also help you grade late submissions quickly and fairly.
  • If you are grading a large number of problem sets, it is critical that you keep track of how many points you are taking off for common errors. Differences of two or three points for the same mistake can be particularly exasperating. Your students will confer about their problem sets and their grading!
  • Programs like Gradescope or SpeedGrader on Canvas can help make grading fair and consistent across multiple graders.
  • Ideally, one person should grade the same problem in an assignment for all students, with several TAs grading each week. This is a fairer approach than having a different TA grade an entire homework assignment each week.

Written Comments

Let students know what they did wrong and how much it hurt their score. Circle or highlight the point where their logic failed and clearly indicate how many points were deducted as a result - use rubric items that have clear explanations. Ideally, write legible (or digital) comments nearby explaining their error. Gradescope allows you to attach a comment to a location on the submission or circle/highlight work. Provide encouraging comments when students find a good alternative approach to a problem.

Responding to Grading Disputes

Many of your students will spend far more time looking over their graded homework or lab reports than you will be able to spend grading them. Don't be surprised when an angry student comes to you saying, "I want my two points!" Be ready to deal with such complaints fairly and competently. Giving out points automatically and refusing to consider any grading changes are both inappropriate ways to deal with the situation. Instead, you should:

  • Take a look at the student's work and see whether it was graded incorrectly.
  • If the student is incorrect but does not understand the concepts presented, explain to them what they have done wrong.
  • If you have made a grading mistake, correct it and record the change; it is very important to students to feel that you are a fair grader.
  • If you have made the same mistake on many papers, you should follow up by issuing a "recall" of the problem sets to the class or updating the Gradescope rubric (and resubmitting scores, if necessary). At the very least, inform students of the error so they are not learning something incorrectly.
  • Talk to the course professor and/or section TA if you notice common errors or important misconceptions in the student work you are grading. This communication is invaluable, especially if you have a purely grading assignment and do not otherwise interact with the students.