Welcome to the Tuesday Teaching Tip, an easy-to-implement tool that you can use immediately in your classroom teaching.  

Tuesday Teaching Tip: Grading Practices to Support Student Learning 

David Brooks made a recent argument in The Atlantic for combating the downfalls of an educational system restricted by historical meritocratic criteria (“How the Ivy League Broke America: The Meritocracy Isn’t Working. We Need Something New,” Dec 2024). The solution he proposes focuses in large part on grading and shifting our criteria for assessing student learning stating that, 

“Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant–but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage [....] The system has become so instrumentalized–How can this help me succeed?--that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?” (30, 32). 

Assessing disciplinary knowledge and ways of knowing are foundational and, at SCU, that learning is happening within the context of an institution that prioritizes Jesuit values. What does your grading prioritize and measure? Why?

Last week’s CAFE conversation, “Grading: Strategies, Successes, and Lessons Learned,” ranged from building trust with students through transparent grading schemas to pain points associated with AI, grade inflation, and time pressures. Six faculty shared some of their strategies for maximizing student learning while managing competing priorities (i.e. research, parenting). 

Quick Tips:

As we approach the end of the quarter, consider these practices to support meaningful closure while helping students demonstrate their learning. Emphasizing revision, clear guidance, and limited flexibility can keep students engaged and focused on improvement while streamlining your time commitment for assessing student work.

• Revision support: Allow targeted corrections or revisions for partial credit to reinforce learning from mistakes.
• Structured revision guidance: Provide clear criteria for success and provide opportunities for self-reflection to ensure students’ revisions focus on targeted improvement.
• Flexible deadlines: When possible, offer short grace periods or lower stakes grading consequences for delayed work to support student persistence in their learning.

CAFE Faculty Panelist Highlights

Sofia Kotsiri, Lecturer, Economics

When I started teaching I used to have the mentality of "maximizing efficiency" until very recently where I accepted the fact that grading is more like a tradeoff between efficiency, fairness, and our well being. Thus, as we are heading towards week 9 I usually assign an in-class grading activity which also gives incentive for students to be present, as it is very common for attendance to drop after the Memorial weekend. There is also going to be some small credit for attendance that will be added on top of their final exam score. The weight of grading activities reduces as we move towards the end of the quarter to alleviate stress and accumulated exhaustion from the academic year but the number of grading activities remains the same until the very last week to keep that momentum of putting the effort to either improve or maintain their grade. 

Eugene (Gene) R. Schlesinger, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies

As the increasing prevalence of AI has prompted me to rethink assignments and assessment, I’ve gotten the unexpected gift of a reminder of the whole purpose of grading: not merely to evaluate my students or their work, but to support their learning. Two practices have emerged in particular:

• • First, an increase in midterm quiz type assignments has afforded me the opportunity to recognize and address emergent themes in how students are understanding (or misunderstanding course material). Grading these assignments provides me a window to take steps to refine my presentation and take early action in heading off misapprehensions. 

• • Second, I’ve been able to recalibrate my expectations of students in real time when I see how they’re performing on an assignment. Some of my assignments have turned out to be overly ambitious in what I thought students might be able to manage with the allotted time. However, by first reading through all submissions to get a sense of the baseline and then assigning grades in light of the performance distribution for the class as a whole, these assignments have still served as a tool for assessing and supporting my students’ learning, which is the whole point of the exercise, after all.

Sumana Sur, Associate Teaching Professor, Information Systems & Analytics

While grading the weekly assignments, I shifted to focusing on timely completion rather than strict penalties as a learning step. I give pointers and focused feedback, and guide the students to identify their own mistakes and then allow them to redo the assignments. I think this approach has taught students to take feedback in a positive way. It fosters a growth mindset, treating the assessments more as progress markers rather than final judgements. In this era of AI, by this process I am trying to encourage and inculcate in them critical thinking skills and the ability to distinguish a correct result versus an incorrect one.

 

DID YOU DO IT?

Let us know how it went. We would love to hear your feedback about how you implemented today’s Tuesday Teaching Tip in your classroom. Click here to fill out our 3-question survey. The survey is anonymous, but if you choose to enter your name, you’ll be entered in a drawing at the end of the quarter to win a new book from Faculty Development!

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

• IRN AI + Sustainability on Wednesday, May 27 RSVP
  
  
• CAFE Campus GenAI Research on Monday, June 1 RSVP
  
  
• End of the Year Party on Wednesday, June 3 - Didn't get your invite? It's not too late! Register for a CAFE or writing retreat today for your ticket in the door.
  
  
• Shut Up & Grade on Friday, June 5 RSVP

 

WANT TO READ A LITTLE MORE? 

Faculty Development Bookshelf Highlight

Joe Feldman (Grading for Equity, 2023) provides three pillars that serve as thoughtful touchpoints for our pedagogical choices around assessment and grading. While his research is grounded in the K-12 context, the principles are relevant for SCU classrooms. In addition to unpacking the three pillars, he provides MANY examples of grading practices based on goals for your teaching and student learning that align with each of the three pillars. Accuracy: Draw on relevant evidence for student grades; Nothing which makes grades misleading, ambiguous, or otherwise incomplete.

• • Bias-Resistant: Practices that disrupt privileging certain kinds of success not relevant for student success in the course learning goals.
    NOTE: Feldman discourages grading for student behaviors - i.e. “participation.”

• • Motivation: “Our grading practices should support a growth mindset, encouraging students to take risks and to recognize the fruits of prolonged practicing through mistakes. The way we grade should increase students’ confidence” (67).

Additional Resources:

• Alternative Grading Strategies
• “Grading for Equity” Harvard Graduate School of Education podcast

This week’s Tuesday Teaching Tip was prepared by Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe and Emily Park on behalf of Faculty Development and the Center for Teaching Excellence.