Why Grading Makes Us Anxious Too

There is nothing more demoralizing than the thought that the countless hours we spend grading might be dismissed as meaningless.” – Elizabeth Bare

Although many students think “they are the only ones who worry about grades,” writes Elizabeth Bare in a recent blog post, “anxiety about grades is also a central feature of faculty life.” While students often worry about how their grades will affect their progress toward graduation, faculty are also concerned about whether their approaches to grading are valid, fair, and efficient, or as Bare puts it, “meaningful, moral, and manageable.” This tip explores several ways of better aligning learning and grading, so that attention to one translates to attention to both elements.

Are the grades I assign meaningful?

When considering whether her grades are meaningful, Bare thinks about grades as measures, but wrestles with what grades are actually measuring: “performance, competency, growth, or effort?” To make grades as meaningful and impactful as possible, we must first define clear goals for student learning. Then, we can design assessments (e.g., projects, tests, quizzes, assignments, and so on) that collect evidence of students’ progress toward those goals. If our assessments measure what we intend for them to measure, the grades students earn with their work will align more closely with their progress toward accomplishing the goals of the course--and therefore become more meaningful.

Is grading moral?

When exploring the morality of her approach to grading, Bare is particularly concerned with the issue of fairness: creating “a system of grading that ensures students in similar circumstances will be treated similarly.” Because developing rubrics helps us define evaluation criteria, they are invaluable tools for grading. Not only can they help keep us focused on the most important aspects of an assignment as we evaluate each student’s work, but they also force us to define this for ourselves and students before grading an assignment. This helps instructors avoid deducting points for minutia irrelevant to the learning goals we’re trying to assess and empowers us to give feedback on more important elements of an assignment.

Two additional strategies related to fairness are grade norming and “blind grading,” or grading anonymous student work. Grade norming entails working with colleagues in an effort to evaluate student work more consistently. It’s particularly important for instructors and TAs working together to grade students’ work within the same course – when using a rubric, for example, start by having your TAs grade the same assignment and then compare rubric scores. This can foster conversations about how to best interpret the rubric categories and how to use them similarly across graders. To grade anonymously, we can use Blackboard’s anonymous grading options that will allow us to review student work, provide feedback, and assign a grade without seeing students’ names.

Is the process of grading manageable?

Rubrics can also help with the management of grading. Starting with clearly defined criteria for success can improve the quality of the assignments you receive. They also aid students in getting closer to accomplishing the assignments’ goals on each attempt, allowing for more targeted feedback. Many faculty have found that dividing up the work of grading (e.g., grading only five projects in one sitting) also helps make the task more manageable and less overwhelming.

Bare experimented with using specifications grading in her course and reported that “the grading was most certainly faster and less anxiety inducing, as I expected it would be.” Her post describes her approach to using “specs” grading in her course, and it also links to several sample syllabi from other courses from which faculty adopted this method.