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The Ultimate Guide to Grading Student Work

Strategies, best practices and practical examples to make your grading process more efficient, effective and meaningful

Top Hat Staff

This ultimate guide to grading student work offers strategies, tips and examples to help you make the grading process more efficient and effective for you and your students. The right approach can save time for other teaching tasks, like lecture preparation and student mentoring. 

Grading is one of the most painstaking responsibilities of postsecondary teaching. It’s also one of the most crucial elements of the educational process. Even with an efficient system, grading requires a great deal of time—and even the best-laid grading systems are not entirely immune to student complaints and appeals. This guide explores some of the common challenges in grading student work along with proven grading techniques and helpful tips to communicate expectations and set you and your students up for success, especially those who are fresh out of high school and adjusting to new expectations in college or university. 

What is grading?

Grading is only one of several indicators of a student’s comprehension and mastery, but understanding what grading entails is essential to succeeding as an educator. It allows instructors to provide standardized measures to evaluate varying levels of academic performance while providing students valuable feedback to help them gauge their own understanding of course material and skill development. Done well, effective grading techniques show learners where they performed well and in what areas they need improvement. Grading student work also gives instructors insights into how they can improve the student learning experience.

Grading challenges: Clarity, consistency and fairness

No matter how experienced the instructor is, grading student work can be tricky. No such grade exists that perfectly reflects a student’s overall comprehension or learning. In other words, some grades end up being inaccurate representations of actual comprehension and mastery. This is often the case when instructors use an inappropriate grading scale, such as a pass/fail structure for an exam, when a 100-point system gives a more accurate or nuanced picture.

Grading students’ work fairly but consistently presents other challenges. For example, grades for creative projects or essays might suffer from instructor bias, even with a consistent rubric in place. Instructors can employ every strategy they know to ensure fairness, accessibility, accuracy and consistency, and even so, some students will still complain about their grades. Handling grade point appeals can pull instructors away from other tasks that need their attention.

Many of these issues can be avoided by breaking things down into logical steps. First, get clear on the learning outcomes you seek to achieve, then ensure the coursework students will engage in is well suited to evaluating those outcomes and last, identify the criteria you will use to assess student performance. 

What are some grading strategies for educators?

There are a number of grading techniques that can alleviate many problems associated with grading, including the perception of inconsistent, unfair or arbitrary practices. Grading can use up a large portion of educators’ time. However, the results may not improve even if the time you spend on it does. Grading, particularly in large class sizes, can leave instructors feeling burnt out. Those who are new to higher education can fall into a grading trap, where far too much of their allocated teaching time is spent on grading. As well, after the graded assignments have been handed back, there may be a rush of students wanting either to contest the grade, or understand why they got a particular grade, which takes up even more of the instructor’s time. With some dedicated preparation time, careful planning and thoughtful strategies, grading student work can be smooth and efficient. It can also provide effective learning opportunities for the students and good information for the instructor about the student learning (or lack of) taking place in the course. These grading strategies can help instructors improve their accuracy in capturing student performance . 

Establishing clear grading criteria

Setting grading criteria helps reduce the time instructors spend on actual grading later on. Such standards add consistency and fairness to the grading process, making it easier for students to understand how grading works. Students also have a clearer understanding of what they need to do to reach certain grade levels.

Establishing clear grading criteria also helps instructors communicate their performance expectations to students. Furthermore, clear grading strategies give educators a clearer picture of content to focus on and how to assess subject mastery. This can help avoid so-called ‘busywork’ by ensuring each activity aligns clearly to the desired learning outcome. 

Step 1: Determine the learning outcomes and the outputs to measure performance. Does assessing comprehension require quizzes and/or exams, or will written papers better capture what the instructor wants to see from students’ performance? Perhaps lab reports or presentations are an ideal way of capturing specific learning objectives, such as behavioral mastery.

Step 2: Establish criteria to determine how you will evaluate assigned work. Is it precision in performing steps, accuracy in information recall, or thoroughness in expression? To what extent will creativity factor in the assessment?

Step 3: Determine the grade weight or value for each assignment. These weights represent the relative importance of each assignment toward the final grade and a student’s GPA. For example, how much will the final exam count relative to a research paper or essay? Once the weights are in place, it’s essential to stratify grades that distinguish performance levels. For example:

• A grade = excellent
• B grade = very good
• C grade = adequate
• D grade = poor but passing
• F grade = unacceptable

Making grading efficient

Grading efficiency depends a great deal on devoting appropriate amounts of time to certain grading tasks. For instance, some assignments deserve less attention than others. That’s why some outcomes, like attendance or participation work, can help save time by getting a simple pass/fail grade or acknowledgment of completion using a check/check-plus/check-minus scale.

However, other assignments like tests or papers need to show more in-depth comprehension of the course material. These items need more intricate scoring schemes and require more time to evaluate, especially if student responses warrant feedback.

When appropriate, multiple-choice questions can provide a quick grading technique. They also provide the added benefit of grading consistency among all students completing the questions. However, multiple-choice questions are more difficult to write than most people realize. These questions are most useful when information recall and conceptual understanding are the primary learning outcomes.

Instructors can maximize their time for more critical educational tasks by creating scheduled grading strategies and sticking to it. A spreadsheet is also essential for calculating many students’ grades quickly and exporting data to other platforms.

Making grading more meaningful in higher education

Grading student work is more than just routine, despite what some students believe. The better students understand what instructors expect them to take away from the course, the more meaningful the grading structure will be. Meaningful grading strategies reflect effective assignments, which have distinct goals and evaluation criteria. It also helps avoid letting the grading process take priority over teaching and mentoring.

Leaving thoughtful and thorough comments does more than rationalize a grade. Providing feedback is another form of teaching and helps students better understand the nuances behind the grade. Suppose a student earns a ‘C’ on a paper. If the introduction was outstanding, but the body needed improvement, comments explaining this distinction will give a clearer picture of what the ‘C’ grade represents as opposed to ‘A-level’ work.

Instructors should limit comments to elements of their work that students can actually improve or build upon. Above all, comments should pertain to the original goal of the assignment. Excessive comments that knit-pick a student’s work are often discouraging and overwhelming, leaving the student less able or willing to improve their effort on future projects. Instead, instructors should provide comments that point to patterns of strengths and areas needing improvement. It’s also helpful to leave a summary comment at the end of the assignment or paper.

Maintaining a complaint-free grading system

In many instances, an appropriate response to a grade complaint might simply be, “It’s in the syllabus.” Nevertheless, one of the best strategies to curtail grade complaints is to limit or prohibit discussions of grades during class time. Inform students that they can discuss grades outside of class or during office hours.

Instructors can do many things before the semester or term begins to reduce grade complaints. This includes detailed explanations in the grading system’s syllabus, the criteria for earning a particular letter grade, policies on late work, and other standards that inform grading. It also doesn’t hurt to remind students of each assignment’s specific grading criteria before it comes due. Instructors should avoid changing their grading policies; doing so will likely lead to grade complaints.

Assigning student grades

Since not all assignments may count equally toward a final course grade, instructors should figure out which grading scales are appropriate for each assignment. They should also consider that various assignments assess student work differently; therefore, their grading structure should reflect those differences. For example, some exams might warrant a 100-point scale rather than a pass/fail grade. Requirements like attendance or class participation might be used to reward effort; therefore, merely completing that day’s requirement is sufficient.

Grading essays and open-ended writing

Some writing projects might seem like they require more subjective grading standards than multiple-choice tests. However, instructors can implement objective standards to maintain consistency while acknowledging students’ individual approaches to the project.

Instructors should create a rubric or chart against which they evaluate each assignment. A rubric contains specific grading criteria and the point value for each. For example, out of 100 points, a rubric specifies that a maximum of 10 points are given to the introduction. Furthermore, an instructor can include even more detailed elements that an introduction should include, such as a thesis statement, attention-getter, and preview of the paper’s main points.

Grading creative work

While exams, research papers, and math problems tend to have more finite grading criteria, creative works like short films, poetry, or sculptures can seem more difficult to grade. Instructors might apply technical evaluations that adhere to disciplinary standards. However, there is the challenge of grading how students apply their subject talent and judgment to a finished product.

For creative projects that are more visual, instructors might ask students to submit a written statement along with their assignment. This statement can provide a reflection or analysis of the finished product, or describe the theory or concept the student used. This supplement can add insight that informs the grade.

Grading for multi-section courses

Professors or course coordinators who oversee several sections of a course have the added responsibility of managing other instructors or graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) in addition to their own grading. Course directors need to communicate regularly and consistently with all teaching staff about the grading standards and criteria to ensure they are applied consistently across all sections.

If possible, the course director should address students from all sections in one gathering to explain the criteria, expectations, assignments, and other policies. TAs should continue to communicate grading-related information to the students in their classes. They also should maintain contact with each other and the course director to address inconsistencies, stay on top of any changes and bring attention to problems.

To maintain consistency and objectivity across all sections, the course director might consider assigning TAs to grade other sections besides their own. Another strategy that can save time and maintain consistency is to have each TA grade only one exam portion. It’s also vital to compare average grades and test scores across sections to see if certain groups of students are falling behind or if some classes need changes in their teaching strategies.

Types of grading

• Absolute grading : A grading system where instructors explain performance standards before the assignment is completed. grades are given based on predetermined cutoff levels. Here, each point value is assigned a letter grade. Most schools adopt this system, where it’s possible for all students to receive an A.
• Relative grading : An assessment system where higher education instructors determine student grades by comparing them against those of their peers. 
• Weighted grades : A method ussed in higher education to determine how different assessments should count towards the final grade. An instructor may choose to make the results of an exam worth 50 percent of a student’s total class grade, while assignments account for 25 percent and participation marks are worth another 25 percent.
• Grading on a curve : This system adjusts student grades to ensure that a test or assignment has the proper distribution throughout the class (for example, only 20% of students receive As, 30% receive Bs, and so on), as well as a desired total average (for example, a C grade average for a given test). We’ve covered this type of grading in more detail in the blog post The Ultimate Guide to Grading on A Curve .

Ungrading is an education model that prioritizes giving feedback and encouraging learning through self-reflection rather than a letter grade. Some instructors argue that grades cannot objectively assess a student’s work. Even when calculated down to the hundredth of a percentage point, a “B+” on an English paper doesn’t paint a complete picture about what a student can do, what they understand or where they need help. Alfie Kohn, lecturer on human behavior, education, and parenting, says that the basis for grades is often subjective and uninformative. Even the final grade on a STEM assignment is more of a reflection of how the assignment was written, rather than the student’s mastery of the subject matter. So what are educators who have adopted ungrading actually doing? Here are some practices and strategies that decentralize the role of assessments in the higher ed classroom.

• Frequent feedback: Rather than a final paper or exam, encourage students to write letters to reflect on their progress and learning throughout the term. Students are encouraged to reflect on and learn from both their successes and their failures, both individually and with their peers. In this way, conversations and commentary become the primary form of feedback, rather than a letter grade. 
• Opportunities for self-reflection: Open-ended questions help students to think critically about their learning experiences. Which course concepts have you mastered? What have you learned that you are most excited about? Simple questions like these help guide students towards a more insightful understanding of themselves and their progress in the course.
• Increasing transparency: Consider informal drop-in sessions or office hours to answer student questions about navigating a new style of teaching and learning.  The ungrading process has to begin from a place of transparency and openness in order to build trust. Listening to and responding to student concerns is vital to getting students on board. But just as important is the quality of feedback provided, ensuring both instructors and students remain on the same page.

Grading on a curve

Instructors will grade on a curve to allow for a specific distribution of scores, often referred to as “normal distribution.” To ensure there is a specific percentage of students receiving As, Bs, Cs and so forth, the instructor can manually adjust grades. 

When displayed visually, the distribution of grades ideally forms the shape of a bell. A small number of students will do poorly, another small group will excel and most will fall somewhere in the middle. Students whose grades settle in the middle will receive a C-average. Students with the highest and the lowest grades fall on either side.

Some instructors will only grade assignments and tests on a curve if it is clear that the entire class struggled with the exam. Others use the bell curve to grade for the duration of the term, combining every score and putting the whole class (or all of their classes, if they have more than one) on a curve once the raw scores are tallied.

How to make your grading techniques easier

Grading is a time-consuming exercise for most educators. Here are some tips to help you become more efficient and to lighten your load.

• Schedule time for grading: Pay attention to your rhythms and create a grading schedule that works for you. Break the work down into chunks and eliminate distractions so you can stay focused.
• Don’t assign ‘busy work’: Each student assignment should map clearly to an important learning outcome. Planning up front ensures each assignment is meaningful and will avoid adding too much to your plate.
• Use rubrics to your advantage: Clear grading criteria for student assignments will help reduce the cognitive load and second guessing that can happen when these tools aren’t in place. Having clear standards for different levels of performance will also help ensure fairness.
• Prioritize feedback: It’s not always necessary to provide feedback on every assignment. Also consider bucketing feedback into what was done well, areas for improvement and ways to improve. Clear, pointed feedback is less time-consuming to provide and often more helpful to students. 
• Reward yourself: Grading is taxing work. Be realistic about how much you can do and in what time period. Stick to your plan and make sure to reward yourself with breaks, a walk outside or anything else that will help you refresh. 

How Top Hat streamlines grading

There are many tools available to college educators to make grading student work more consistent and efficient. Top Hat’s all-in-one teaching platform allows you to automate a number of grading processes, including tests and quizzes using a variety of different question types. Attendance, participation, assignments and tests are all automatically captured in the Top Hat Gradebook , a sophisticated data management tool that maintains multiple student records.

In the Top Hat Gradebook, you can access individual and aggregate grades at a glance while taking advantage of many different reporting options. You can also sync grades and other reporting directly to your learning management system (LMS). 

Grading is one of the most essential components of the teaching and learning experience. It requires a great deal of strategy and thought to be executed well. While it certainly isn’t without its fair share of challenges, clear expectations and transparent practice ensure that students feel included as part of the process and can benefit from the feedback they receive. This way, they are able to track their own progress towards learning goals and course objectives.

Click here to learn more about Gradebook, Top Hat’s all-in-one solution designed to help you monitor student progress with immediate, real-time feedback.

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Center for Teaching

Grading student work.

Print Version

What Purposes Do Grades Serve?

Developing grading criteria, making grading more efficient, providing meaningful feedback to students.

• Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-Sectioned Courses

Minimizing Student Complaints about Grading

Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson identify the multiple roles that grades serve:

• as an  evaluation of student work;
• as a  means of communicating to students, parents, graduate schools, professional schools, and future employers about a student’s  performance in college and potential for further success;
• as a  source of motivation to students for continued learning and improvement;
• as a  means of organizing a lesson, a unit, or a semester in that grades mark transitions in a course and bring closure to it.

Additionally, grading provides students with feedback on their own learning , clarifying for them what they understand, what they don’t understand, and where they can improve. Grading also provides feedback to instructors on their students’ learning , information that can inform future teaching decisions.

Why is grading often a challenge? Because grades are used as evaluations of student work, it’s important that grades accurately reflect the quality of student work and that student work is graded fairly. Grading with accuracy and fairness can take a lot of time, which is often in short supply for college instructors. Students who aren’t satisfied with their grades can sometimes protest their grades in ways that cause headaches for instructors. Also, some instructors find that their students’ focus or even their own focus on assigning numbers to student work gets in the way of promoting actual learning.

Given all that grades do and represent, it’s no surprise that they are a source of anxiety for students and that grading is often a stressful process for instructors.

Incorporating the strategies below will not eliminate the stress of grading for instructors, but it will decrease that stress and make the process of grading seem less arbitrary — to instructors and students alike.

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

• Consider the different kinds of work you’ll ask students to do for your course.  This work might include: quizzes, examinations, lab reports, essays, class participation, and oral presentations.
• For the work that’s most significant to you and/or will carry the most weight, identify what’s most important to you.  Is it clarity? Creativity? Rigor? Thoroughness? Precision? Demonstration of knowledge? Critical inquiry?
• Transform the characteristics you’ve identified into grading criteria for the work most significant to you, distinguishing excellent work (A-level) from very good (B-level), fair to good (C-level), poor (D-level), and unacceptable work.

Developing criteria may seem like a lot of work, but having clear criteria can

• save time in the grading process
• make that process more consistent and fair
• communicate your expectations to students
• help you to decide what and how to teach
• help students understand how their work is graded

Sample criteria are available via the following link.

• Analytic Rubrics from the CFT’s September 2010 Virtual Brownbag
• Create assignments that have clear goals and criteria for assessment.  The better students understand what you’re asking them to do the more likely they’ll do it!
• letter grades with pluses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.)
• 100-point numerical scale (for exams, certain types of projects, etc.)
• check +, check, check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.)
• pass-fail or credit-no-credit (for preparatory work)
• Limit your comments or notations to those your students can use for further learning or improvement.
• Spend more time on guiding students in the process of doing work than on grading it.
• For each significant assignment, establish a grading schedule and stick to it.

Light Grading – Bear in mind that not every piece of student work may need your full attention. Sometimes it’s sufficient to grade student work on a simplified scale (minus / check / check-plus or even zero points / one point) to motivate them to engage in the work you want them to do. In particular, if you have students do some small assignment before class, you might not need to give them much feedback on that assignment if you’re going to discuss it in class.

Multiple-Choice Questions – These are easy to grade but can be challenging to write. Look for common student misconceptions and misunderstandings you can use to construct answer choices for your multiple-choice questions, perhaps by looking for patterns in student responses to past open-ended questions. And while multiple-choice questions are great for assessing recall of factual information, they can also work well to assess conceptual understanding and applications.

Test Corrections – Giving students points back for test corrections motivates them to learn from their mistakes, which can be critical in a course in which the material on one test is important for understanding material later in the term. Moreover, test corrections can actually save time grading, since grading the test the first time requires less feedback to students and grading the corrections often goes quickly because the student responses are mostly correct.

Spreadsheets – Many instructors use spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) to keep track of student grades. A spreadsheet program can automate most or all of the calculations you might need to perform to compute student grades. A grading spreadsheet can also reveal informative patterns in student grades. To learn a few tips and tricks for using Excel as a gradebook take a look at this sample Excel gradebook .

• Use your comments to teach rather than to justify your grade, focusing on what you’d most like students to address in future work.
• Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an assignment.
• Comment primarily on patterns — representative strengths and weaknesses.
• Avoid over-commenting or “picking apart” students’ work.
• In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students rather than provide answers for them.

Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-sectioned Courses (for course heads)

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to teaching assistants, graders, and students in your course.
• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your teaching assistants and graders.
• Encourage teaching assistants and graders to share grading concerns and questions with you.
• have teaching assistants grade assignments for students not in their section or lab to curb favoritism (N.B. this strategy puts the emphasis on the evaluative, rather than the teaching, function of grading);
• have each section of an exam graded by only one teaching assistant or grader to ensure consistency across the board;
• have teaching assistants and graders grade student work at the same time in the same place so they can compare their grades on certain sections and arrive at consensus.
• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus.
• Avoid modifying your policies, including those on late work, once you’ve communicated them to students.
• Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.
• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focusing rather on course learning goals.

For a comprehensive look at grading, see the chapter “Grading Practices” from Barbara Gross Davis’s  Tools for Teaching.

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Scoring & Grading Practices

Introduction*.

Assigning students grades is an important component of teaching, and many school districts issue progress reports, interim reports, or midterm grades as well as final semester grades. Traditionally, these reports were printed on paper and sent home with students or mailed to students’ homes. Increasingly, school districts are using web-based grade management systems that allow parents to access their child’s grades on each assessment and the progress reports and final grades.

Grading can be frustrating for teachers as there are many factors to consider. In addition, report cards typically summarize in brief format a variety of assessments and so cannot provide much information about students’ strengths and weaknesses. This means that report cards focus more on assessment of learning than assessment for learning. Several decisions must be made when assigning students’ grades, and schools often have detailed policies that teachers must follow. In this chapter, we consider major questions associated with grading.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to

• Define the purpose of grading;
• Identify classroom-level grading practices that align with purpose;
• Implement researched-based grading & reporting practices;
• Analyze the effectiveness of traditional grading practices to report student learning fully.

Purpose of Grading

Beginning with an understanding of purpose is key to developing effective grading practices. Susan Brookhart has written a lot about grading practices and encourages educators to focus first on determining what they believe about the purpose of grading. In “ Starting the Conversation about Grading ” (2011), Brookhart asserted:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that getting sidetracked with details of scaling (letters, percentages, or rubrics? Zeros or not? No Ds or Fs?) or policies (What should we do with late or missing work? How can we report behavior? What will we do about academic honors and awards?) before you tackle the question of what a grade means in the first place will lead to trouble . Logic, my own experience, and the research and practice of others (Cox & Olsen, 2009; Guskey & Bailey, 2010; McMunn, Schenck, & McColskey, 2003) all scream that this is the case.

Grading scales and reporting policies can be discussed productively once you agree on the main purpose of grades. For example, if a school decides that academic grades should reflect achievement only, then teachers need to handle missed work in some other way than assigning an F or a zero. Once a school staff gets to this point, there are plenty of resources they can use to work out the details (see Brookhart, 2011; O’Connor, 2009). The important thing is to examine beliefs and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of grades first . Without a clear sense of what grading reform is trying to accomplish, not much will happen.

Take some time to reflect on what you believe a grade should represent. Consider how the school districts below define the purpose of grading in their grading philosophy and compare it to a district you work in or are familiar with.

• Glenpool School District Grading Philosophy (OK)
• West Des Moines Community Schools Grading Philosophy   (IA)

According to Brookhart, it is essential that educators first answer the question, “What is the purpose of a grade?” before deciding on grading practices within their classroom. Once a teacher defines their purpose, they should then check to make sure their purpose aligns with the school’s grading policy. A good supporting question when defining the purpose of a grade might be, “Is your purpose as a teacher to select talent, or is it to develop talent?” The answer will define not only how you approach grading but probably most aspects of your teaching practice.

According to Guskey (2015), researchers found that teachers and school leaders identify six common purposes for grades:

• Communicate information about student learning to parents;
• Provide information to students for self-reflection;
• Select, identify, or group students;
• Incentivize students to learn;
• Evaluate the quality of instruction; and
• Provide evidence of a student’s lack of effort.

No single grading instrument can accurately report all six of the aspects above to the fullest extent. Therefore, in an attempt to make their grading system more transparent and consistent, some schools have done the hard work of clarifying their purpose for grading. In the next section, we will explore a particular approach to grading with a specific purpose that seems to be a growing trend in schools across the country.

Reflection Questions

Accuracy Question: Do the grades I report accurately reflect my students’ true level of understanding?

Confidence Question: Do my grading practices contribute to student confidence or do they raise anxiety?

(Schimmer, 2016)

Adopting a Standards-Based Mindset

Many school districts have started looking for ways to make their grading practices more transparent. One of the biggest trends you will find in the literature is the idea of standards-based grading, sometimes also referred to as standards-referenced, criterion-referenced, or mastery grading. There are various forms of this idea being implemented and tested. As a novice educator, you should be aware of this concept as you may end up in a district that uses a version of this grading philosophy, or you may find that certain aspects may align strongly with your philosophy and choose to integrate them into your future grading practices at the classroom level.

School districts that shift their grading practices to a standards-based approach have a clearly defined purpose for what grades represent. Educational experts contend that in a standards-based grading mindset, the purpose of grading is to report where a student is in relation to a specific learning target (Brookhart, 2009; Dueck, 2014; Guskey, 2015; Popham, 2017; Schimmer, 2016). In adopting this belief, student effort, participation, past attempts, attendance, behavior, punctuality, etc. are not a factor in the final grade but are reported separately. This belief that grades should reflect student mastery or understanding of specific standards only contrasts with traditional grading practices that often factor in non-academic skills and dispositions. For an example, consider reading how Adam Dyche , Social Studies Dept. Chair at Waubonsie Valley High School defines a Standards-Based Mindset .

“The standards-based mindset is not about establishing flawless formulas, but rather a way for teachers to THINK as they examine the evidence of learning students produce” (Schimmer, 2016, p.61).

Common Grading Practices

Take some time to reflect on the problems identified in the article Why It’s Crucial – And Really Hard – To Talk About More Equitable Grading to see how different grading practices can not only present misleading information to students and parents, but also undermine a clear purpose of grading.

Defining the purpose of grading is only effective if the practices used to determine students’ grades support the stated purpose. According to Guskey (2015), most teachers agree that grades should reflect how well students have demonstrated mastery of the established learning goals. Still, teachers use a variety of criteria to determine grades that often don’t align with that purpose. By not reflecting on grading practices, a teacher may inadvertently assign scores to students in a manner that does not align with their beliefs about what that grade should represent. Traditional methods of calculating grades include weighted averages, averaging, and total points earned. The key takeaway here is not that every teacher should assume the same grading procedures but that all teachers should take a moment to reflect on how their grading practices align with either the school’s or their purpose of grading statement.

The best way to align grading practices with purpose is through sound assessment practices. The problem is that too often, we as teachers adopt grading practices that do not align with effective assessment practices (Schimmer, 2016). Some commonly used grading practices may be in direct opposition to assigning a grade that reports student mastery of learning objectives, including averaging scores, assigning zeros, giving extra credit, and assessing penalties for behavior (Guskey, 2015; Schimmer, 2016; Dueck, 2014). The problem with these grading practices is that they distort the ability of the grade to accurately report student understanding of the learning objectives. Next, we will present some questions you can ask yourself when you begin to set up your grading policies and discuss some potential strengths and weaknesses of common approaches.

How are various assignments and assessments weighted?*

Students typically complete various assignments during a grading period, such as homework, quizzes, performance assessments, etc. Teachers have to decide—preferably before the grading period begins—how each assignment will be weighted. For example, a sixth-grade math teacher may decide to weight the grades in the following manner:

Deciding how to weight assignments should be done carefully as it communicates to students and parents what teachers believe is important, and also may be used to decide how much effort students will exert (e.g. “If homework is only worth 5 percent, it is not worth completing twice a week”). Notice in the presentation below how your choices in how many points to assign a particular assignment may impact the final grade calculation.

Read or Listen to Jennifer Gonzalez’s blog post, How Accurate Are Your Grades? Gonzalez presents questions teachers should consider when planning how their grading process will work in their classroom.

Should scores be averaged to calculate the final grade?

How we think about learning influences how we grade, and our actions (grading) show our students what we value about learning. One teacher action that a common grading practice is to average scores to tabulate a final grade. When averaging grades, teachers calculate the sum of all points earned during a grading period and divide that sum by the total number of points possible. This process determines the mean, or average, which can be reported as a percentage or letter grade (i.e., C- may be equivalent to 70%). The problem with averaging scores to determine grades is that it may not accurately describe current levels of student understanding. Consider the example of two students in Figure 1. Student 1 completed all homework assignments (HW) for full credit but showed limited understanding on quizzes (Qz) and tests. Student 2 did not complete assigned homework but demonstrated sufficient understanding on quizzes and tests. Critics of using the averaging approach would argue that averaging the scores for these students does not provide an accurate representation of their current level of understanding.

Should zeros or penalties be assigned for missing and late work?

In the previous example (Figure 1), Student 2 was assigned zeros for missing work. This practice of assigning zeros is similar to assigning penalties to student work based on behavioral issues such as late submission. Penalties decrease the accuracy of our grading and are not proven to increase student interest or effort (Schimmer, 2016). Especially when using a 100-point grading scale, using zeros unproportionally pulls a student’s grade down. Similarly, penalties are used to encourage things like timeliness, but that is not reported during the grading process, only the lower score, which, after being penalized, now reflects a lower degree of understanding.

Should homework scores be included in the final grade calculation?

To give homework or to not give homework? This question has been debated and researched with mixed results. John Hattie’s work looking at the effect size of homework on student learning suggests that overall, homework has a small to modest effect on student learning. However, there seems to be a greater effect for students as they age (HS > MS > Elem), and that homework seems most impactful when it is short, focused on material students are ready for, and when students have input. In the end, the question may not be whether you should give homework, but what you should do with it once students complete it.

In a classroom using traditional grading practices, homework typically accounts for a significant portion of the final grade. Even if the homework is a small percentage of the final grade, it is a form of summative assessment. In a standards-based classroom, homework is often viewed as practice and an opportunity to receive feedback without a score or for a very small score. In other words, using homework as a formative assessment.

A common concern teachers have is that if homework is not graded, students will not do it. Schimmer (2016) argues that adopting the mindset of, “if I don’t grade it, they won’t do it” suggests that students have no interest in learning and reduces school to an exercise of accumulating points. Another disadvantage of including homework in the final grade calculation is that it can distort the final grade due to factors such as cheating, confusion, unreadiness, and factors outside of the student’s control.

Should social skills or effort be included?*

• Read an article by Douglas Reeves, Lee Ann Jung, and Ken O’Connor (2017) for an overview of four common grading practices that may do more harm than good .
• Read what Joe Feldman says about What Traditional Classroom Grading Gets Wrong .
• Rick Wormeli writes a lot about grading practices. See what he identifies as Grading Malpractice .
• Ken O’Connor’s 15 Fixes for Grading

Elementary school teachers are more likely than middle or high school teachers to include some social skills in report cards (Popham, 2005). These may be included as separate criteria in the report card or weighted into the grade for that subject. For example, the grade for mathematics may include an assessment of group cooperation or self-regulation during mathematics lessons. Some schools and teachers endorse including social skills in the grading process, arguing that developing such skills is important for young students and that students need to learn to work with others and manage their behaviors to be successful. Others believe that grades in subject areas should be based on cognitive performances—and that if assessments of social skills are made, they should be separated from the subject grade on the report card. Clear criteria, such as those contained in analytical scoring rubrics, should be used if social skills are graded.

Teachers often find it difficult to decide whether effort and improvement should be included as a component of grades. One approach is for teachers to ask students to submit drafts of an assignment and make improvements based on the feedback they receive. The grade for the assignment may include some combination of the score for the drafts, the final version, and the amount of improvement the students made based on the feedback provided.

A more controversial approach is basing grades on effort when students try really hard day after day but still cannot complete their assignments well. These students could have identified special needs or be recent immigrants that have limited English skills. Some school districts have guidelines for handling such cases. One disadvantage of using improvement as a component of grades is that the most competent students in the class may do very well initially and have little room for improvement—unless teachers are skilled at providing additional assignments that will help challenge these students.

Teachers often use “hodgepodge grading,” i.e. a combination of achievement, effort, growth, attitude or class conduct, homework, and class participation. A survey of over 8,500 middle and high school students in the US state of Virginia supported the hodgepodge practices commonly used by their teachers (Cross & Frary, 1999).

Should grades be calculated on a curve?*

Two options are commonly used: absolute grading and relative grading. In absolute grading, grades are assigned based on criteria the teacher has devised. If an English teacher has established a level of proficiency needed to obtain an A and no student meets that level, then no A’s will be given. Alternatively, if every student meets the established level, then all the students will get A’s (Popham, 2005). Absolute grading systems may use letter grades or pass/fail.

In relative grading, the teacher ranks students’ performances from worst to best (or best to worst); those at the top get high grades, those in the middle moderate grades, and those at the bottom low. This is often described as “grading on the curve” and can be useful to compensate for an examination or assignment that students find much easier or harder than the teacher expected.

However, relative grading can be unfair to students because the comparisons are typically within one class, so an A in one class may not represent the level of performance of an A in another class. Relative grading systems may discourage students from helping each other improve as students compete for limited rewards. Bishop (1999) argues that grading on the curve gives students a personal interest in persuading each other not to study as a serious student makes it more difficult for others to get good grades.

What kinds of grade descriptions should be used?*

Traditionally, a letter grade system is used (e.g. A, B, C, D, F ) for each subject. The advantages of these grade descriptions are they are convenient, simple, and can be averaged easily. However, they do not indicate what objectives the student has or has not met or students’ specific strengths and weaknesses (Linn & Miller 2005). Elementary schools often use a pass-fail (or satisfactory-unsatisfactory) system, and some high schools and colleges do as well. Pass-fail systems in high school and college allow students to explore new areas and take risks on subjects that they may have limited preparation for or is not part of their major (Linn & Miller 2005). While a pass-fail system is easy to use, it offers even less information about students’ level of learning.

A pass-fail system is also used in classes taught under a mastery-learning approach in which students are expected to demonstrate mastery of all the objectives to receive course credit. Under these conditions, it is clear that a pass means that the student has demonstrated mastery of all the objectives.

Some schools have implemented a checklist of the objectives in subject areas to replace the traditional letter grade system. Students are rated on each objective using descriptors such as Proficient, Partially Proficient, and Needs Improvement. For example, the checklist for students in a fourth-grade class in California may include the four types of writing that are required by the English language state content standards

• writing narratives
• writing responses to literature
• writing information reports
• writing summaries

The advantages of this approach are that it communicates students’ strengths and weaknesses clearly, and it reminds the students and parents of the objectives of the school. However, if too many objectives are included, the lists can become so long that they are difficult to understand.

Grading In PE (or skills-based classrooms)

If you are currently teaching, or plan to teach in a heavily skills-based content area (i.e., physical education, art, music, world language, etc.), then you may be thinking that this grading discussion doesn’t pertain to you. If that is the case, then you should check out Joey Feith ’s blog titled Meaningful Grades in Physical Education . The emphasis is on PE, but the ideas and practices could easily be applied to other skill-based content areas and traditional classroom settings.

Grading Practices to Consider

There may be no perfect answer to the problem of assigning student grades. However, there are a few practices that you might consider making a part of your grading policy if your goal is for your grades to accurately depict student achievement of learning objectives.

Identify Standards to Assess

The first place you should start is by identifying specific learning targets for your grading period. The best way to fight grade inflation (or deflation) is through clearly defined standards and quality assessments that align with those standards (Guskey, 2015; Heff, 2019). Similar to writing learning objectives for your daily lessons and assignments, identify the main objectives that you plan to summatively assess for the semester up front. From there, you can track student progress throughout the semester. You might also consider having your students track their progress, see how Dan Meyer used a concept checklist in his math classes.

Use a 4 Point Scale

Consider switching from the traditional 100-point grading scale to a 4-point scale. According to Guskey (2015), a four-point scale provides a smaller number of grading categories, which will result in a more reliable score of student learning. In the traditional 100-point scale, each grade category has a 10-point spread (ex. C 70-79). In addition, there are 60 levels of failure (0-59) and only 40 levels of passing (60-100). This creates an imbalance in the final grade calculation. The 4-point model removes this issue by assigning each grade level a single-point spread (0-F, 1-D, 2-C, 3-B, 4-A).

A 4-point scale is familiar to students as it reflects the GPA format and can be converted to a percentage score for grade reporting. Schimmer (2016) suggests that 4-point scores could be averaged at the end of the grading cycle and converted to a traditional grading scale. For example, averages between 3.25 and 4.0 would equate to an A, 2.50 to 3.24 equal a B, 1.75 to 2.49 equal a C, and 1.00 to 1.74 equal a D. Some schools have even suggested reviewing all of the scores for student learning and considering the median and mode scores rather relying solely on the average score. For example, see how Bremerton Schools outlines how student grades will be calculated using a 4-point scale .

Remove Grade Distortion

The potential for grade distortion when applying penalties and zeroes to students’ grades has been addressed earlier in the chapter. Removing these practices from your grading may help your final grades more accurately reflect student understanding. A similar practice is offering extra credit. When extra credit is added to a student’s score, the grade may or may not reflect the student’s current level of understanding. For example, suppose a student was to earn extra credit points for bringing items to class, attending an event, or completing some task that is not directly aligned with the objective(s) of the assessment. In that case, the additional points earned distort the grade. An alternative to offering extra credit to improve a score would be to allow students to revise their work without penalty. Reassessment is a key component of ensuring that your grades reflect the current level of understanding of your students. Consider adjusting scores to reflect current understanding after students have revised work or completed alternative assessments. For example, see how North Jr High allows students to retest and revise assessments (slides 10 & 11). Also, consider Guskey’s (2023) defense for how reassessment is supported by research in his article, Giving Retakes Their Best Chance to Improve Learning . Lastly, consider the strategies suggested for limiting the number of retake opportunities in the article, How Many Retakes Should Students Get?

Examples of Standards-Based Grading Approaches in Different Content Areas

• Math-Dan Meyer
• Math-Dane Ehlert
• Social Studies

Discussion Questions

• Do grades motivate learning? Why or why not?
• What does a grade represent? What does it tell us about a student? What does it not tell us?
• If I get an A and you get a C, is that “fair”? Does it need to be? Is that a reasonable expectation in a classroom?
• What are some potential problems with the traditional A–F grading system in a classroom? What are the benefits?
• What are some potential pedagogical benefits of removing grades from a classroom? Are there potential downsides? How could we avoid those issues?
• How have grades affected your approach to learning in the past?
• Think of a time when grading helped you improve. What was helpful about it specifically? Why has it stuck with you?
• Think of a time when grading has impacted you negatively. How did it impact you? How did it affect your approach going forward? Why has it stuck with you?

Discussion Questions  by Liz Delf, Rob Drummond, and Kristy Kelly are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

There are many things to consider before entering your classroom for the first time, and how you grade your students should be one area that you give some considerable thought. You probably won’t have your perfect grading policy figured out the first time. However, you should begin by asking yourself, what is the purpose of grades in my classroom? From there, you can review any policies your district might have and ensure that your thoughts about grading align with your district. Regardless, you should take the time to think through how your grading policies will encourage students to engage in the learning process and how your final reporting will reflect student learning.

Extend Your Learning

• I strongly recommend Dueck’s book, Grading Smarter Not Harder . It is an easy read and has a lot of great ideas and resources for use in the classroom.
• If you are interested in hearing more about Dueck’s ideas, consider watching his webinar . I think this might be a great conversation starter with other teachers.
• If Rick Wormeli’s ideas interest you, then you can find numerous videos online where he discusses these ideas in greater detail. If you start with his video on Redo’s, Retakes, and Do-Overs , then you can follow the trail to other videos. Or, google “Rick Wormeli grading videos” and you can pick based on your interest.
• If you are teaching or plan to teach math, then you should check out Dan Meyer’s The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource . The ideas presented here could easily be translated into any content area, so don’t shy away just because it is math related.
• Can’t get enough? Check out these Suggested Readings

Summarizing Key Understandings

References & attribution.

Attribution: Sections noted with “*” were adapted in part from  Ch. 15 Teacher made assessment strategies by Kevin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Brookhart, S. M. (2009). Grading (2nd ed.). New York: Merrill.

Dueck, M. (2014). Grading smarter not harder. ASCD

Guskey, T. R. (2015). On your mark: Challenging the conventions of grading and reporting. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press

Popham, J. W. (2017). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (8th ed.). New York: Pearson

Schimmer, T. (2016). Grading from the inside out: Bringing accuracy to student assessment through standards-based mindset. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press

Teaching Methods & Practices Copyright © by Jason Proctor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Assessment Rubrics

A rubric is commonly defined as a tool that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing criteria, and for each criteria, describing levels of quality (Andrade, 2000; Arter & Chappuis, 2007; Stiggins, 2001). Criteria are used in determining the level at which student work meets expectations. Markers of quality give students a clear idea about what must be done to demonstrate a certain level of mastery, understanding, or proficiency (i.e., "Exceeds Expectations" does xyz, "Meets Expectations" does only xy or yz, "Developing" does only x or y or z). Rubrics can be used for any assignment in a course, or for any way in which students are asked to demonstrate what they've learned. They can also be used to facilitate self and peer-reviews of student work.

Rubrics aren't just for summative evaluation. They can be used as a teaching tool as well. When used as part of a formative assessment, they can help students understand both the holistic nature and/or specific analytics of learning expected, the level of learning expected, and then make decisions about their current level of learning to inform revision and improvement (Reddy & Andrade, 2010). 

Why use rubrics?

Rubrics help instructors:

Provide students with feedback that is clear, directed and focused on ways to improve learning.

Demystify assignment expectations so students can focus on the work instead of guessing "what the instructor wants."

Reduce time spent on grading and develop consistency in how you evaluate student learning across students and throughout a class.

Rubrics help students:

Focus their efforts on completing assignments in line with clearly set expectations.

Self and Peer-reflect on their learning, making informed changes to achieve the desired learning level.

Developing a Rubric

During the process of developing a rubric, instructors might:

Select an assignment for your course - ideally one you identify as time intensive to grade, or students report as having unclear expectations.

Decide what you want students to demonstrate about their learning through that assignment. These are your criteria.

Identify the markers of quality on which you feel comfortable evaluating students’ level of learning - often along with a numerical scale (i.e., "Accomplished," "Emerging," "Beginning" for a developmental approach).

Give students the rubric ahead of time. Advise them to use it in guiding their completion of the assignment.

It can be overwhelming to create a rubric for every assignment in a class at once, so start by creating one rubric for one assignment. See how it goes and develop more from there! Also, do not reinvent the wheel. Rubric templates and examples exist all over the Internet, or consider asking colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments. 

Sample Rubrics

Examples of holistic and analytic rubrics : see Tables 2 & 3 in “Rubrics: Tools for Making Learning Goals and Evaluation Criteria Explicit for Both Teachers and Learners” (Allen & Tanner, 2006)

Examples across assessment types : see “Creating and Using Rubrics,” Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and & Educational Innovation

“VALUE Rubrics” : see the Association of American Colleges and Universities set of free, downloadable rubrics, with foci including creative thinking, problem solving, and information literacy. 

Andrade, H. 2000. Using rubrics to promote thinking and learning. Educational Leadership 57, no. 5: 13–18. Arter, J., and J. Chappuis. 2007. Creating and recognizing quality rubrics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall. Stiggins, R.J. 2001. Student-involved classroom assessment. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reddy, Y., & Andrade, H. (2010). A review of rubric use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation In Higher Education, 35(4), 435-448.

Tips for Grading Efficiently and Fairly

How do i grade well on a deadline, ten tips for fair and efficient grading.

• Develop clear assignment expectations before the assignment is handed out and share them with your students.
• Use a rubric to specify grading criteria.
• Grade all responses to the same question together.
• Anonymize assignments when grading.
• Skim a sample of the assignment submissions before grading.
• Limit the scope of your feedback to 2-3 major corrections when possible.
• Create a bank of comments.
• Take regular breaks.
• Create wrappers for your assignments.
• Prepare for grading challenges.

Read below for more explanation, description, examples, and resource links.

1. Develop clear assignment expectations before the assignment is handed out and share them with your students. 

Remember your students will come from a variety of different backgrounds and have different amounts of support in completing their work. Students of privilege will be less impacted by poor directions because they are supported by a network that has informal knowledge about college. For underserved student populations, like first-generation college students, students of color, and other minoritized populations, the lack of clear expectations can cause them to stumble—not because they can’t do what you’re asking of them, but because they didn’t understand what you were asking of them. For this reason, focus on providing clear and widely understood expectations and directions. Doing this is one of the best ways to benefit all of your students and make grading less frustrating for you as well!

With your teaching team, create a grading policy to give students at the beginning of the course. This should include things like: how you will handle late assignments, how students can ask questions about grades, a clear process for how students can challenge a grade respectfully, how quickly students can expect feedback, and how grades and feedback will be shared. 

2. Use a Rubric to specify grading criteria. 

A rubric shows students how an assignment will be scored, and typically outlines specific criteria students must meet and what constitutes a complete and successful assignment. See examples and read more about Grading and Performance Rubrics from the Eberly Center.  You will see more about grading with rubrics in Canvas in an upcoming page. In developing a Rubric, you should work with your teaching team. 

3. Grade all responses to the same question together. 

Imagine you are grading an exam with multiple questions. Whether they are essay responses, or lengthy calculations, your grading will be more consistent for each student if you grade all responses to question 1 before grading question 2. You will be better able to track themes or common problems across students, and be able to more easily apply consistent feedback. Later in today’s content, we will cover Speedgrader, which allows you to grade by question. 

4. Anonymize assignments when grading.

To “anonymize” an assignment means you remove student identifying information, so you don’t know which student you are grading. This practice helps to minimize bias, and is commonly used in screening job applications. Even the most well-intentioned teachers still have feelings and implicit biases, i.e. attitudes that unconsciously affect actions, that affect their grading (Boysen & Vogel, 2009).  Information on how to anonymize assignments when grading in Canvas can be found here: Anonymous Grading in Canvas . 

5. Skim a sample of the assignment submissions before grading.

Especially when you are new to grading and to a particular assignment, it can be hard to calibrate your expectations. Often, the first grades you assign will be too harsh or too easy. As you grade more students’ assignments you will start to find the right balance of how discriminating you want to be, the amount and level of corrections you offer, and the time you can spend on each assignment. By skimming the assignments beforehand or assigning grades in pencil, you can help ensure all of your students are receiving consistent treatment.

6. Limit the scope of your feedback to 2-3 major corrections when possible.

You don’t always need to comment on everything that is wrong on an assignment. This is inefficient both in terms of your time and student learning. Focus on the most important and clear corrections, and provide instructions for improvement. This will make it easier for your students to understand the most important aspects of the assignment.

7. Create a bank of comments.

You will likely find yourself offering the same comments repeatedly. To save time you can create abbreviations (e.g. NC = needs citation) or a numbered bank of comments with detailed corrections which you share with the students. Then, as you grade, all you need to do is put the appropriate abbreviation or number that corresponds to the comment and correction in your bank. 

8. Take regular breaks.

Grading all of your assignments without a break may mean you are more likely to be tired or frustrated at the end. This may make you more harsh or less detailed in your feedback. Instead, make a schedule with breaks and rewards during the time you allot for grading.

9. Create wrappers for your assignments. 

Wrappers are short worksheets that come before or after an assignment. These can help identify student preferences for feedback as well as serve as reflection tools, which aid in student learning. Wrappers can ask things like:  What grade do you expect to receive on this assignment? What are you most proud of in this assignment? Is there anything in particular you want me to focus on or provide feedback on while grading this assignment?

This information can help you decide how best to provide feedback. It can also help students make connections between their effort, your feedback, their grade, and how they can improve ( TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 4 , n.d.). Read more about Metacognitive Wrapper Questions.

10. Prepare for grading challenges. 

A student challenging a grade can be both an intimidating and stressful situation. This is an area where it is extremely important to be on the same page as your lead instructor. Make sure you discuss this eventuality beforehand as well as any individual cases that arise. Having a clear policy will help you navigate the situation easily in the moment. Discuss this with your teaching team! 

Consider creating a policy in your course that creates space and time for you and the student to review the assignment and then have a calm discussion. Some policy suggestions include: asking students to wait at least 24 hours to contact you about their grade, asking students to email you to schedule a face-to-face or private virtual meeting and summarize their complaint, or specifying that you will not re-grade the assignment with the student present. Don’t be afraid to do what you think is right. Sometimes, the student will be mistaken and you can stand by what you originally said. Other times, you might have made a mistake  – simply acknowledge it and correct it. It is not a sign of weakness for you to admit the mistake. Review L&S Grade Appeal Information if you are teaching an L&S course. 

Boysen, G. A., & Vogel, D. L. (2009). Bias in the Classroom: Types, Frequencies, and Responses. Teaching of Psychology , 36 (1), 12–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280802529038

Staats Cheryl et al. (2017). State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2017. Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Retrieved June 21, 2020, from http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2017-SOTS-final-draft-02.pdf

TEAL Center Fact Sheet No. 4: Metacognitive Processes . (n.d.). LINCS | Adult Education and Literacy | U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved June 24, 2020, from https://lincs.ed.gov/state-resources/federal-initiatives/teal/guide/metacognitive

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• Grade assignments

Grade & return an assignment

This article is for teachers.

In Classroom, you can give a numeric grade, leave comment-only feedback, or do both. You can also return assignments without grades.

You can grade and return work from:

• The Student work page.
• The Classroom grading tool.
• The Grades page.

For Grades page instructions, go to View or update your gradebook .

For practice sets, learn how to grade a practice set assignment .

You can download grades for one assignment or for all assignments in a class.

Display assignments & import quiz grades

Before viewing a student's assignment, you can see the status of student work, and the number of students in each category.

Go to classroom.google.com  and click Sign In.

Sign in with your Google Account. For example,  [email protected] or [email protected] .  Learn more .

• Click the class.
• At the top, click Classwork .
• Select the assignment to display.
• Tip: You can only get to the student work page when the number isn't "0" for both "Turned in" and "Assigned."
• Assigned —Work that students have to turn in, including missing or unsubmitted work
• Turned in —Work that students turned in
• Graded —Graded work you’ve returned
• Returned —Ungraded (non-graded) work you’ve returned
• (Optional) To see the students in a category, click Turned in , Assigned , Graded , or Returned .
• To check a student’s submission, click on the assignment thumbnail.
• At the top-right, click Import Grades .
• Click Import to confirm. The grades autofill next to the students’ names. Note: Importing grades overwrites any grades already entered.
• (Optional) To return grades, next to each student whose grade you want to return, check the box and click Return . Students can see their grade in Classroom and Forms.

Enter, review, or change grades

• Red—Missing work.
• Green—Turned in work or draft grade.
• Black—Returned work.
• Click the Student Work tab.

The default grading scale is numerical based on the total points of the assignment. For expanded grading scales option, Education Plus and Teaching and Learning Upgrade editions have it. You can align Classroom grading to your school's system whether:

• For example, letter grades A to F or proficiency unsatisfactory to excellent.
• For example, 4 point scales.
• For example, emojis.

Grading scales features work with:

• Average grade calculation
• SIS integration
• Practice sets and Forms auto-grading

You can enter a grade either for the number of points or, if you have grading scales set up, based on the levels on the grading scale. For example, if you have letter grades set up in your class and you assign a 10 point assignment, under “Grade,” you can:

• Select Good 8/10 from the dropdown menu
• You and your co-teachers can find all grades in both points value and the level it corresponds to.

A student can find both the points value and the level it corresponds to if a grade is returned.

• Next to the student's name, enter the grade. The grade saves automatically.
• Enter grades for any other students.

You can enter grades and personalize your students feedback with the Classroom grading tool.

• Go to classroom.google.com .
• Optional: Under the classwork filter, select a grading period. Learn how to create or edit grading periods .
• Next to the student’s name, and under the relevant assignment, enter the grade.
• The grade saves as a draft.
• Select Good 8/10 from the dropdown menu.

• If a grade returns, a student can find both the points value and the level it corresponds to.
• Optional: Enter grades for any other students and assignments.

Tip: You can return assignments without a grade.

• On the left, click a student's name.
• Click See history .
• Next to a student’s name, click the grade you want to change.
• Enter a new number. The new grade saves automatically.

Return work or download grades

Students can’t edit any files attached to an assignment until you return it. When you return work, students get notifications if they’re turned on. You can return work, with or without a grade, to one or more students at a time.

You can start with the default grading scale options, or create your own grading scale.

• Proficiency
• Letter grades
• 4 point scale
• Create your own: Creates a custom grading scale.
• Edit the level and values of your grading scale.

• Click Select .
• At the top right, click Save .
• When you edit a default grading scale, it becomes a custom grading scale.
• When you remove a custom grading scale that was previously used in a class, a confirmation dialog displays, and you won’t be able to access it again.
• Next to the student's name, and under the relevant assignment, enter the grade.

• The student’s assignment is marked Returned.
• On the left, check the box next to each student whose assignment you want to return.
• Click Return and confirm.

Download grades to Sheets

Download grades to a CSV file

• To download grades for one assignment, select Download these grades as CSV .
• To download all grades for the class, select Download all grades as CSV . The file saves to your computer.

Related topics

• Set up grading
• Give feedback on assignments
• Grade and return question answers
• Create and grade quizzes
• Grade & track practice set assignments
• Use a screen reader with Classroom on your computer
• Export grades to your SIS

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Assessing Learning

Grading + Rubrics

Some of the most difficult and time-consuming work that instructors and TAs do is grading student work. Whether you’re an experienced teacher, or just starting out, you will find tips on this page to improve grading efficiency, make grading more equitable, fair, and clear to your students.

Efficient Grading       Equitable Grading       Rubrics

Purpose of Grading

Ultimately, your assessments should be structured and graded in ways that motivate learning, rather than punish mistakes. We grade student work to provide feedback, open lines of communication, motivate improvement, and evaluate performance.

Provide Feedback - Grading gives the opportunity to provide short, targeted feedback. Limit overly critical feedback, and where possible, highlight at least one thing students did well, and one area they can improve upon. 

Open Lines of Communication - The goal of assessment is to enable both parties, teacher and student, to learn where they stand relative to the learning goals. Our grading should facilitate students’ reflection on their learning, allow them to demonstrate what they understand, and discover where they are struggling.

Motivate Improvement - It’s important for our assessments to validate students’ progress, while encouraging them to learn from mistakes. Use light-touch feedback techniques , and provide opportunities for students to improve their grades. Where possible, let them redo, revise, and repeat.

Evaluate Performance - Grades are an evaluation of performance on a given task. Use specific performance criteria derived from the course learning objectives in your grading, and communicate to students what those performance criteria are before the assessment.

Make Grading Efficient

It benefits our students to receive feedback on their work in a timely manner, and we generally want to cut down the time we spend grading. You can strategize ways to make grading more efficient by using simplified metrics appropriate for the assignment, timing tools, and incorporating technologies.

UCSB Educational Technologies for Grading

Grading Assignments u sing Gradescope

Using Rubrics in Canvas

Using Gradescope for handwritten work and multiple-choice exams

iClicker for participation, polling and measuring student understanding

Simplified Grading Metrics or ‘Light Grading’

For some lower-stakes assessments, consider using simplified metrics like plus-check-minus rather than letter grades or percentages so you can grade more quickly.

Plus-Check-Minus

Minus (or 0): Didn’t do or didn’t understand

Check (or 1): Partially complete or missing something important

Plus (or 2): Complete and/or correct

Grade just some representative samples of student work. For instance, maybe only some questions are evaluated for accuracy and others on completion.

In many classroom and homework activities, grading on participation (credit/no-credit) is adequate to encourage active learning and independent studying, and can cut down on overall grading load.

Use ‘ Light-touch Feedback ’, which are brief emails to groups of students (e.g., ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D/F’ students) indicating your awareness of their performance on recent assignments, some commonly given feedback and encouragement targeted for each group of students, and direction to resources that can help them.

Student Self-Correction and Peer Review

Teaching students how to learn and work in your discipline means teaching them to set learning goals, measure their progress, and figure out where to put their efforts for continuous improvement. They also need to learn how to critique their own work and that of their peers’ in appropriate ways. 

Have students assess their own work using some given criteria (see rubrics below) before they submit it so they can identify any gaps in their learning or disciplinary thinking. 

Allow student self-correction or peer-correction on short writing samples, quizzes and exams by making it a classroom or homework activity. 

Consider using online peer reviewing tools, like Eli Review , for students to provide peer feedback on each other’s work before students submit their work to you. It helps students turn in better work - which is always faster to grade!

For summative assessments, consider having students write a few sentences as a cover letter to their work describing what the strengths and weaknesses of their work are from their own perspective. They submit the cover letter with their work, which gives you a better idea of what to give feedback on and what the real gaps in learning might be for your class.

Timing Tools

Grading will take as much time as you give it - and more if you let it! Here are a few ideas to help you not get overwhelmed.

Set a timer to strictly hold yourself to, for example, 3-5 minutes per assignment, or 10-15 minutes per essay. Limit your feedback to comments students can use for improvement.

Create a grading schedule to space out your grading, and incorporate breaks to avoid burnout.

Make sure to track your time spent grading. 

Grade with a fellow TA. Set a specific time to meet and get as much grading done as possible during that time.

Ask people who have similar kinds of assignments for advice on how to grade, what to put your effort into, and how much time might be “too much”.

Create a set of common phrases for feedback that you may find yourself giving to multiple students, and then copy/paste those onto student work, or use online grading tools in the course website to apply those phrases to student work with a few clicks.

Make Grading Equitable

Grading quickly is important, but cannot come at the expense of quality and fairness. We want our feedback to open lines of communication with students, and to be as transparent and accurate as possible, ensuring all students get a similar amount and type of feedback, with no preferential treatment. To make your grading more equitable, try implementing strategies like creating specific criteria or rubrics, TA group grading, and/or blind grading.

Grading Group Work

Specify the Criteria

Before grading assignments, consider what kinds of work your students are asked to perform on that assignment (answering questions on a quiz, responding to essay prompts, writing a paper, group work, etc.), and note which criteria you would need to see met for you to consider it to be a good performance on that work. This can increase your grading accuracy and consistency, thereby making it more equitable for your students. Then grade a few assignments using that criteria to see if you need to make adjustments. See the section on rubrics below for more details.

TA Group Grading

Grading with your fellow TAs or with a peer can help you stay consistent and discuss grading issues as they occur. 

Hold a Norming Session: All readers/TAs get together and grade examples of student work together to identify potential challenges and create a common set of expectations. If possible, identify A, B, C, and F papers/projects, or responses that exceed, meet, or do not meet expectations.

Assign each grader a specific section/page of an exam to grade, instead of a certain number of exams to grade in full. This helps ensure consistency in grading across all exams and across different sections of students.

Blind Grading 

Blind Grading means that you are unaware of the students’ identities (e.g., names) as you grade the work. This reduces the likelihood of grading student performance based on your subjective understanding of the students.

In Gauchospace, you can select “Blind Grading” to hide student identities (remind students to submit their assignments without identifying information in the document itself). 

For blue books, go through and open all at once so you cannot see names as you move through the stack. 

For essays, require students to only put their names on cover sheets which can be flipped over as you move though the stack.

Rubrics: Grading Papers, Projects, and Creative Work

Papers, projects, presentations and creative work usually involve a combination of critical thinking skills and multiple genres of work from students (such as group work, public speaking, academic writing, casual writing, graphic design, etc.). Rubrics help instructors determine and grade the specific combination of skills represented by a complex assignment by measuring each required skill independently, while also looking at students' work holistically. Rubrics also clarify and prioritize an assignment’s requirements, so students can focus their efforts appropriately and identify gaps in their learning. All of this makes your grading more equitable and efficient! 

Rubrics should be customized for each assignment to ensure that instructors are measuring the learning objectives associated with the assignment. They typically contain three essential components: 

A list of criteria that will be graded (i.e. thinking skills used in the assignment and format requirements. For example, ‘depth of analysis’ and ‘reference list’). 

Descriptions of how students demonstrate those criteria on the assignment.

An evaluative scale that shows how many points each criterion is worth or what level of proficiency the student has attained.

What do rubrics look like?

Choose a grading framework that aligns with the complexity of the assignment and the level of detailed feedback students need about their work. All rubrics should leave space for instructor comments. Here are some example rubric frameworks:

Checklist : List of expectations that are either met or not met, with an area for overall comments.

Analytic Matrix : (see simplified example in video above as well) Includes multiple performance criteria, rating scales, and description and/or examples of indicators for each rating. 

Single Point : Describes acceptable proficiency in each criteria only (no gradations of proficiency) and leaves space for comments.

Holistic : 3-5 levels of performance, along with a broad definition of the characteristics that define each level.

Most rubrics are organized into a matrix, with the thinking skills and requirements listed in the left column, descriptions of those criteria in the other columns, and a grading scale that applies a certain number of points to each criterion either in the top row or as its own column. 

Many rubrics look more like a checklist, with each criterion listed with its descriptions of proficiency in paragraph form or as bullet points. The scale can be in the descriptions or somewhere else on the document - as long as the students can see the relative weights or acceptable performance levels for the criteria so they know where to focus their energies. 

For creative projects it is important you provide enough structure to allow you to evaluate work fairly, while encouraging students to express themselves. Also make all minimum requirements very clear, like sources/references, page/word limits, or time limits for presentations, and formatting. 

How can I use a rubric as a grading tool?

Try to create the rubric as you write or modify the assignment instructions. Then give it to the students with the instructions. Tell them to use it as a reference for where to focus their efforts. Consider allowing the students to fill out the rubric themselves as a cover letter to their assignment submission. Return the rubric to the student with their graded work so they can see the rationale behind the grade they received.

If you have a digital rubric on the course website or another grading tool, then you will fill out the rubric options when you create the assignment submission. As you grade each submission you will see options for assigning points and leaving comments. 

If you have a paper document that you are using as a rubric, print out a rubric for each student, and then use a pencil to check off the matrix cells that best describe the student’s performance and write comments. A pencil allows you to make adjustments as you grade the class. 

If you have a digital document as a rubric, copy/paste it onto their work or on the grading screen, or attach it to their submission in the grading area. Alternatively, have the students add the rubric (unfilled) to their work, or as an attachment to it. You can use the digital grading tools to fill it out.

When should I share my rubric with the class?

We recommend giving your students the rubric at the same time you give them the assignment instructions. This can reduce the number of questions and future complaints about unfair grading. You can also reference the rubric while teaching related skills and content.

If students are writing an essay during a midterm or final exam time, distribute the rubric several weeks in advance of the due date, so they can use it to focus their studying and preparation

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Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

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Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

Learning & Education

Google Assignments, your new grading companion

Aug 14, 2019

[[read-time]] min read

Instructors lose valuable time doing cumbersome tasks: writing the same comment on multiple essays, returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine jams. These frustrations are most often felt by instructors with the highest teaching workloads and the least time. For the last five years, we’ve been building tools—like Classroom and Quizzes in Google Forms—to address these challenges. Now you can take advantage of these tools if you use a traditional Learning Management System (LMS). 

Assignments brings together the capabilities of Google Docs, Drive and Search into a new tool for collecting and grading student work. It helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks. You can use Assignments as a standalone tool and a companion to your LMS (no setup required!) or your school admin can integrate it with your LMS. Sign up today to try Assignments.

If you're one of the 40 million people using Classroom: you've got the best of Assignments already baked in, including our new originality reports . For everyone else, Assignments gives you access to these features as a compliment to your school’s LMS. 

Assignments is your tireless grading companion

Using an LMS can create more work than it saves: students turn in all kinds of files, you have to download and re-upload student files one-by-one, and what if students can keep editing after they already turned in their work? Assignments handles all this for you.

Assignments streamlines the creation and management of coursework, and tackles some of your biggest frustrations:

Stop typing the same feedback over and over by using a comment bank, and never worry about pressing the “save” button again

Check student work for originality and automatically lock work once it’s turned in

Assign files with the option to send each student a copy (no more copy machines!)

Grade assignments for an entire class with a student switcher and rubrics, and review any file type without leaving your grading interface

Comment and leave suggestions on student work with Google Docs

Instructors and students can attach anything to assignments: Docs or Word files for papers, spreadsheets for data analysis, slides for presentations, sites for digital portfolios or final projects, Colab notebooks for programming exercises, and much more. 

Help students turn in their best work with originality reports

With originality reports in Assignments, you can check student work for missed citations and possible plagiarism without interrupting your grading workflow. When students turn in a document, Assignments will check students’ text against hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. 

If you enable originality reports on an assignment, students can also check their work for authenticity (a limited number of times) to correct issues, turn in their best work, and save instructors time grading. Since both you and your students can see originality reports, they’re designed to help you teach your students about authenticity and academic integrity. 

Getting started with Assignments

Starting today, you can sign up to get access to Assignments when it becomes available in a few weeks. Assignments will be available for free as part of G Suite for Education and can be used by instructors alongside or integrated with an LMS. 

Instructors can use Assignments even if your school has an LMS. There’s no setup required, all you need is to sign up and have a school-issued Google account. 

Admins can turn on access to Assignments within your LMS. Assignments is available as an LTI tool, which provides a more integrated experience and enables roster syncing and grade transmission to your LMS gradebook. Assignments is an improved and expanded version of Course Kit, so if you’re already in the Course Kit beta, you’ll automatically have access to Assignments. 

If you use Canvas, we’ve worked with their team to complement the Assignments LTI tool with a set of additional features that make Docs and Drive work seamlessly across all Canvas assignments. 

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• Basics for GSIs
• Advancing Your Skills

Grading Essays

Grade for Learning Objectives Response to Writing Errors Commenting on Student Papers Plagiarism and Grading

Information about grading student writing also appears in the Grading Student Work section of the Teaching Guide. Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind when grading student writing.

Grade for Learning Objectives

Know what the objective of the assignment is and grade according to a standard (a rubric) that assesses precisely that. If the purpose of the assignment is to analyze a process, focus on the analysis in the essay. If the paper is unreadable, however, consult with the professor and other GSIs about how to proceed. It may be wise to have a shared policy about the level of readiness or comprehensibility expected and what is unacceptable.

Response to Writing Errors

The research is clear: do not even attempt to mark every error in students’ papers. There are several reasons for this. Teachers do not agree about what constitutes an error (so there is an unavoidable element of subjectivity); students do not learn when confronted by too many markings; and exhaustive marking takes way too much of the instructor’s time. Resist the urge to edit or proofread your students’ papers for superficial errors. At most, mark errors on one page or errors of only two or three types. One approach to avoid the temptation of marking every error is to read or skim the whole essay quickly once without marking anything on the page – or at least, with very minimal marks. Some instructors find this a useful method in order to get a general sense of the essay’s organization and argument, thus enabling them to better identify the major areas of concern. Your second pass can then focus more in-depth on a few select areas that require improvement.

Commenting on Student Papers

The scholarly literature in this area distinguishes formative from summative comments. Summative comments are the more traditional approach. They render judgment about an essay after it has been completed. They explain the instructor’s judgment of a student’s performance. If the instructor’s comments contain several critical statements, the student often becomes protective of his or her ego by filtering them out; learning from mistakes becomes more difficult. If the assignment is over with, the student may see no reason to revisit it to learn from the comments.

Formative comments, on the other hand, give the student feedback in an ongoing process of learning and skill building. Through formative comments, particularly in the draft stage of a writing assignment, instructors guide students on a strategic selection of the most important aspects of the essay. These include both what to keep because it is (at least relatively) well done and what requires revision. Formative comments let the student know clearly how to revise and why.

For the purposes of this guide, we have distinguished commenting on student writing (which is treated here) from grading student writing (which is treated in the Teaching Guide section on grading ). While it is true that instructors’ comments on student writing should give reasons for the grade assigned to it, we want to emphasize here that the comments on a student’s paper can function as instruction , not simply as justification. Here are ten tips.

• Use your comments on a student’s paper to highlight things the paper accomplishes well and a few major things that would most improve the paper.
• Always observe at least one or two strengths in the student’s paper, even if they seem to you to be low-level accomplishments — but avoid condescension. Writing is a complex activity, and students really do need to know they’re doing something right.
• Don’t make exhaustive comments. They take up too much of your time and leave the student with no sense of priority among them.
• Don’t proofread. If the paper is painfully replete with errors and you want to emphasize writing mechanics, count the first ten errors on the page, draw a line at that point, and ask the student to identify them and to show their corrections to you in office hours. Students do not learn much from instructors’ proofreading marks. Direct students to a writing reference guide such as the Random House Handbook.
• Notice patterns or repeated errors (in content or form). Choose the three or four most disabling ones and direct your comments toward helping the students understand what they need to learn to do differently to correct this kind of error.
• Use marginal notes to locate and comment on specific passages in the paper (for example “Interesting idea — develop it more” or “I lost the thread of the argument in this section” or “Very useful summary here before you transition to the next point”). Use final or end comments to discuss more global issues (e.g., “Work on paragraph structure” or “The argument from analogy is ineffective. A better way to make the point would be…”)
• Use questions to help the student unpack areas  that are unclear or require more explanation and analysis. E.g.: “Can you explain more about what you mean by “x”?”; “What in the text shows this statement?”; “Is “y” consistent with what you’ve argued about “z”?” This approach can help the student recognize your comments less as a form of judgment than a form of dialogue with their work. As well, it can help you avoid “telling” the student how they should revise certain areas that remain undeveloped. Often, students just need a little more encouragement to focus on an area they haven’t considered in-depth or that they might have envisioned clearly in their head but did not translate to the page.
• Maintain a catalogue of positive end comments: “Good beginning for a 1B course.” “Very perceptive reading.” “Good engagement with the material.” “Gets at the most relevant material/issues/passages.” Anything that connects specific aspects of the student’s product with the grading rubric is useful. (For more on grading rubrics , see the Grading section of the Teaching Guide.)
• Diplomatic but firm suggestions for improvement: Here you must be specific and concrete. Global negative statements tend to enter students’ self-image (“I’m a bad writer”). This creates an attitudinal barrier to learning and makes your job harder and less satisfying. Instead, try “The most strategic improvement you could make is…” Again, don’t try to comment on everything. Select only the most essential areas for improvement, and watch the student’s progress on the next draft or paper.
• Typical in-text marks: Provide your students with a legend of your reading marks. Does a straight underline indicate “good stuff”? Does a wavy underline mean something different? Do you use abbreviations in the margins? You can find examples of standard editing marks in many writing guides, such as the Random House Handbook.
• The tone of your comments on student writing is important to students. Avoid sarcasm and jokes — students who take offense are less disposed to learn. Address the student by name before your end-comments, and sign your name after your remarks. Be professional, and bear in mind the sorts of comments that help you with your work.

Plagiarism and Grading

Students can be genuinely uninformed or misinformed about what constitutes plagiarism. In some instances students will knowingly resort to cutting and pasting from unacknowledged sources; a few may even pay for a paper written by someone else; more recently, students may attempt to pass off AI-generated essays as their own work. Your section syllabus should include a clear policy notice about plagiarism and AI so that students cannot miss it, and instructors should work with students to be sure they understand how to incorporate outside sources appropriately.

Plagiarism can be largely prevented by stipulating that larger writing assignments be completed in steps that the students must turn in for instructor review, or that students visit the instructor periodically for a brief but substantive chat about how their projects are developing, or that students turn in their research log and notes at intermediate points in the research process.

All of these strategies also deter students from using AI to substitute for their own critical thinking and writing. In addition, you may want to craft prompts that are specific to the course materials rather than overly-general ones; and you may also require students to provide detailed analysis about specific texts or cases. AI tools like ChatGPT tend to struggle significantly in both of these areas.

For further guidance on preventing academic misconduct, please see Academic Misconduct — Preventing Plagiarism .

You can also find more information and advice about AI technology like ChatGPT at the Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning.

UC Berkeley has a campus license to use Turnitin to check the originality of students’ papers and to generate feedback to students about their integration of written sources into their papers. The tool is available in bCourses as an add-on to the Grading tool, and in the Assignments tool SpeedGrader. Even with the results of the originality check, instructors are obligated to exercise judgment in determining the degree to which a given use of source material was fair or unfair.

If a GSI does find a very likely instance of plagiarism, the faculty member in charge of the course must be notified and provided with the evidence. The faculty member is responsible for any sanctions against the student. Some faculty members give an automatic failing grade for the assignment or for the course, according to their own course policy. Instances of plagiarism should be reported to the Center for Student Conduct; please see If You Encounter Academic Misconduct .

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Creating Grading Rubrics for Writing Assignments

Pamela Flash

Establishing and discussing specific characteristics of success when an assignment is first distributed benefits both students and instructors. Creating grading rubrics, or grids, is a typical way to do this. Having received the criteria with an assignment, students are able to write toward specific goals. Later, when they look at their grades, they can see at a glance the strengths and weaknesses of their work. Instructors are able to grade according to customized descriptive criteria that reflect the intention of a specific assignment and won't change according to the hour of night or the amount of effort a particular student is suspected of expending. Rubrics can also save on grading time, as they allow instructors to detail comments on one or two elements and simply indicate ratings on others. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in courses that involve more than one instructor, as in team-taught or multi-sectioned courses, because they ensure that all instructors are measuring work by the same standards.

Step One: Identifying Criteria

The first step involved in creating assignment-specific rubrics is revisiting an assignment's intended outcomes. These objectives can be considered, prioritized, and reworded to create a rubric's criteria. If, for example, an instructor assigns a literature review hoping that students might become skilled at reducing complex texts down to pithy summaries, "concise summary" can be one of the grading criteria included in the rubric. Care must be taken to keep the list of criteria from becoming unwieldy; ten ranked items is usually the upper limit. In addition, to be usefully translated and used by students, criteria should be specific and descriptive. Criteria like "clear," "organized," and "interesting" don't mean much to students when they sit down to revise.

Step Two: Weighing Criteria

When criteria have been identified, decisions are made about their varying importance. Say, for example, that an essay is assigned by a geography professor who intends for students to become skilled at creating concrete and accurate observation-based descriptions, practiced in analyzing their data and in devising a land-use proposal, and able to create correctly-formatted, error-free prose. When creating a grading rubric for that assignment, the instructor will need to decide on the relative weight of each criterion. Is the error-free prose objective equal to the analysis objective?

Step Three: Describing Levels of Success

When the criteria have been set, decisions must be made about an assessment scale. Many instructors like to limit this section of the rubric to a three-point scale ("weak," "satisfactory," "strong"). Others may prefer to break this down into five or six levels, adding categories like "needs extensive revision," or "outstanding."

Step Four: Creating and Distributing the Grid

When the specific criteria and levels of success have been named and ranked, they can be sorted into a table (see samples below) and distributed with the assignment. Note that spaces are created for comments on each item and again at the end.

1=not present   2=needs extensive revision   3=satisfactory   4=strong   5=outstanding

• African American & African Studies
• Agronomy and Plant Genetics
• Animal Science
• Anthropology
• Applied Economics
• Art History
• Carlson School of Management
• Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
• Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering
• College of Biological Sciences
• Communication Studies
• Computer Science & Engineering
• Construction Management
• Curriculum and Instruction
• Dental Hygiene
• Apparel Design
• Graphic Design
• Product Design
• Retail Merchandising
• Earth Sciences
• Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management
• Family Social Science
• Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology
• Food Science and Nutrition
• Geography, Environment and Society
• German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch
• Health Services Management
• Horticultural Science
• Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Information Technology Infrastructure
• Mathematics
• Mechanical Engineering
• Medical Laboratory Sciences
• Mortuary Science
• Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development
• Political Science
• School of Architecture
• School of Kinesiology
• School of Public Health
• Spanish and Portuguese Studies
• Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
• Theatre Arts & Dance
• Youth Studies
• New Enrollments for Departments and Programs
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• Writing in Your Course Context
• Syllabus Matters
• Mid-Semester Feedback Strategies
• Designing Effective Writing Assignments
• Writing Assignment Checklist
• Scaffolding and Sequencing Writing Assignments
• Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
• 5-Minute Revision Workshops
• Reflective Memos
• Conducting In-Class Writing Activities: Notes on Procedures
• Now what? Responding to Informal Writing
• Teaching Writing with Quantitative Data
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• Conferencing with Student Writers
• Designing Inclusive Writing Assigments
• Addressing a Range of Writing Abilities in Your Courses
• Effective Grading Strategies
• Designing and Using Rubrics
• Running a Grade-Norming Session
• Working with Teaching Assistants
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• What is ChatGPT and how does it work?
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Grade Calculator

Use this calculator to find out the grade of a course based on weighted averages. This calculator accepts both numerical as well as letter grades. It also can calculate the grade needed for the remaining assignments in order to get a desired grade for an ongoing course.

(optional) Final Grade Goal Weight of Remaining Tasks Grade Format: Points, percentage, mix Letters Weight Format: Percentage Points Show Final Grade Planning Options Final Grade Calculator Use this calculator to find out the grade needed on the final exam in order to get a desired grade in a course. It accepts letter grades, percentage grades, and other numerical inputs. Related GPA Calculator The calculators above use the following letter grades and their typical corresponding numerical equivalents based on grade points. Letter Grade GPA Percentage A+ 4.3 97-100% A 4 93-96% A- 3.7 90-92% B+ 3.3 87-89% B 3 83-86% B- 2.7 80-82% C+ 2.3 77-79% C 2 73-76% C- 1.7 70-72% D+ 1.3 67-69% D 1 63-66% D- 0.7 60-62% F 0 0-59% Brief history of different grading systems In 1785, students at Yale were ranked based on "optimi" being the highest rank, followed by second optimi, inferiore (lower), and pejores (worse). At William and Mary, students were ranked as either No. 1, or No. 2, where No. 1 represented students that were first in their class, while No. 2 represented those who were "orderly, correct and attentive." Meanwhile at Harvard, students were graded based on a numerical system from 1-200 (except for math and philosophy where 1-100 was used). Later, shortly after 1883, Harvard used a system of "Classes" where students were either Class I, II, III, IV, or V, with V representing a failing grade. All of these examples show the subjective, arbitrary, and inconsistent nature with which different institutions graded their students, demonstrating the need for a more standardized, albeit equally arbitrary grading system. In 1887, Mount Holyoke College became the first college to use letter grades similar to those commonly used today. The college used a grading scale with the letters A, B, C, D, and E, where E represented a failing grade. This grading system however, was far stricter than those commonly used today, with a failing grade being defined as anything below 75%. The college later re-defined their grading system, adding the letter F for a failing grade (still below 75%). This system of using a letter grading scale became increasingly popular within colleges and high schools, eventually leading to the letter grading systems typically used today. However, there is still significant variation regarding what may constitute an A, or whether a system uses plusses or minuses (i.e. A+ or B-), among other differences. An alternative to the letter grading system Letter grades provide an easy means to generalize a student's performance. They can be more effective than qualitative evaluations in situations where "right" or "wrong" answers can be easily quantified, such as an algebra exam, but alone may not provide a student with enough feedback in regards to an assessment like a written paper (which is much more subjective). Although a written analysis of each individual student's work may be a more effective form of feedback, there exists the argument that students and parents are unlikely to read the feedback, and that teachers do not have the time to write such an analysis. There is precedence for this type of evaluation system however, in Saint Ann's School in New York City, an arts-oriented private school that does not have a letter grading system. Instead, teachers write anecdotal reports for each student. This method of evaluation focuses on promoting learning and improvement, rather than the pursuit of a certain letter grade in a course. For better or for worse however, these types of programs constitute a minority in the United States, and though the experience may be better for the student, most institutions still use a fairly standard letter grading system that students will have to adjust to. The time investment that this type of evaluation method requires of teachers/professors is likely not viable on university campuses with hundreds of students per course. As such, although there are other high schools such as Sanborn High School that approach grading in a more qualitative way, it remains to be seen whether such grading methods can be scalable. Until then, more generalized forms of grading like the letter grading system are unlikely to be entirely replaced. However, many educators already try to create an environment that limits the role that grades play in motivating students. One could argue that a combination of these two systems would likely be the most realistic, and effective way to provide a more standardized evaluation of students, while promoting learning. Search Search form You are here. Implementing Writing in Your Course On Grading Writing When we imagine grading our students’ written assignments, many of us visualize a single letter or number, perhaps accompanied by a few sentences of commentary, written on a student’s final draft (or typed into a box in Canvas). But grading, which is more holistically known as assessment, is much more than a final score. The most successful assessment of student writing happens throughout the writing process, from assignment (and course) design, to final grades. Also, whether or not we choose to embrace the reality, writing (and all) assessment has important implications for equity and inclusion in our teaching. Abundant research shows that ostensibly "colorblind" or "neutral" assessment practices tend to have disparate impacts on students. Indeed, these disparities are deeply entrenched in the very discourses we are trying to get our students to learn. As writing assessment scholar Asao Inoue writes in his book  Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies ,  If we are beyond the old-fashion bigotry and bias, then what we are saying is that there is something wrong with the academic discourse itself, something wrong with judging everyone against an academic discourse that clearly privileges middle class white students. In fact, there’s something wrong with judgment itself in writing classrooms. While refusing to give grades on principle is not a decision most instructors have the power to make, there are approaches you can take to grading writing that help mitigate biases inherent in all of us as individuals, and in the disciplines in which we teach. That leads to more equitable impacts on students. These approaches also, importantly, improve your teaching efficiencies and benefit student learning.  The five strategies in this guide ask you to think about: Formative and Summative Assessment: Key Differences There are different kinds of feedback you can provide on student writing, and these are roughly divided into the categories of “formative” and “summative.” Formative feedback is given on work in progress; it is provided with an eye toward project development, or revision. Formative feedback might be given on a topic proposal (e.g., “Have you considered this angle? Have you checked this source?”), or on a rough draft (e.g., “As you revise, consider making your central argument more explicit.”). Some formative feedback serves only to signal that you have read and care about your student’s ideas; it expects no revision or “correction” (e.g., “Thank you for sharing your family history in this reading response; I can see why you are invested in this topic.”). While some formative assessment may have a numerical grade tied to it, feedback is often qualitative in nature-- usually it is written or typed, shared verbally in conference, or even audio recorded*. Many writing teachers consider formative feedback to be the most important because it happens during the writing process when students can respond to it, and provides an opportunity for learning and development. Summative assessment is given at the completion of an assignment or project. It is meant to tell a student how successfully they completed the requirements of an assignment, and whether learning objectives were met. While there is often qualitative feedback included with a summative assessment, it is typically quantitative in nature and is presented as a score that represents a certain percentage of the course grade. Often students purport to care more about summative assessments for this very reason! It is helpful to consider the differences between formative and summative feedback because that knowledge can help you determine how to structure your response to student writing, and how much time to invest in producing it. For example, do not spend hours writing comments on final papers if students will not have the opportunity to put that feedback to work via revision (or to put it in more jaded terms, do not kill yourself writing comments that students will not bother reading!). *Canvas enables you to give recorded verbal feedback in the SpeedGrader screen. Beneath the text box for written comments, there is a button with a speaker icon. Click that to record your comments. Some may find this a faster way to give feedback. Back to top Providing Regular and Helpful Feedback What follows are some strategies for offering feedback in such a way that students are motivated (intrinsically or extrinsically) to respond to and learn from it. You do not need to use all of these strategies for them to be useful. As with any new teaching practice, starting small is advisable-- each quarter, attempt one small intervention, and expand gradually. Formative feedback: Asking students to complete regular low-stakes, “writing to learn” assignments such as discussion forums, reading responses, journal entries, or post-assignment debriefs is a meaningful way to build up to higher stakes assignments. However, by no means do you need to comment on (or even read!) every informal piece of student writing. Just check in often enough to let students know you’re interested, that this is not just busy work, and offer remarks and probing questions along the way. Of course, when you ask your students to share something personal about themselves, it is the compassionate thing to respond, even if briefly. Scaffold major writing assignments . Create milestones for a major project with actual deadlines, such as a topic proposal, chunks of a draft (such as an introduction), a rough draft, peer review, and a final draft. Provide the most extensive feedback at the most important points, such as the topic proposal (so you can help point students in the right direction, offer suggestions for sources, etc.) and rough draft (so students can revise productively). Research, and our experience, show that students benefit immensely from verbal feedback . Even better is providing verbal clarification of written feedback on writing in progress. If you or a TA is able to meet with a student, or a small group of students at a time (asking everyone to read each other’s work in advance), to discuss the students’ progress on a project, they will be much more able to internalize what you want them to prioritize for revision. Structured peer review can be immensely profitable for students . You can even set it up so that students conduct peer review sessions outside of class, thus preserving precious class time for other matters. However it is essential that you provide very clear procedures for students, and require students to submit some kind of document (for credit), documenting their participation. Such documentation might include copies of their peer feedback or minutes from their session, which you would only need to spot check. Please see a sample peer review prompt here . Remember that there are several writing centers on campus that can support students’ writing in progress , such as the OWRC , CLUE , and OWRC for Health Sciences students. Encourage your students to go! And remember, the clearer your prompt and assessment criteria, the better the feedback tutors can give. Summative feedback: Final grades should always be derived from transparent criteria that students are familiar with from the start . Assessment criteria should be explicitly tied to assignment- and even course learning goals (see the next section, “What Is a Rubric and How Should I Use It?” for more on this). Make sure students know what form their final assessments will take . If you plan to only offer a series of numerical rubric scores with no commentary (because, say, you will be expending your energy on providing feedback on rough drafts), be sure to say so in advance. Encourage students to ask questions . If you create a class culture wherein grades are perceived as objective and permanent measures then students are less likely to become active participants in their learning (and in the field of study they are working to enter). This is not to suggest that you encourage grade haggling; it will likely be necessary to set boundaries there. But being available, or asking TAs to be available, to walk students through their scores will help students see how they can improve next time, which also incidentally aids their learning. You might even consider permitting the revision of one assignment for a new grade, or for extra credit. What is a Rubric, And How Should I Use It? Rubrics can take so many forms that, often, when we talk about rubrics we are imagining different things. Partly because the genre of "grading rubric" is so huge and amorphous, the use of rubrics has generated some amount of controversy. As Alfie Kohn writes , rubrics are not great when they only serve to rank students and give extrinsic motivation (nor when they perpetuate harmful ideologies about language). Rubrics  can be valuable if they "offer feedback that will help [students] become more adept at, and excited about, what they’re doing." To that end, we offer here some definitions of what a good rubric is, and is not. A good rubric IS: A heuristic for feedback and assessment that thoroughly describes higher order characteristics of a successful writing assignment. Here is one example. A good rubric IS NOT: A list of check-boxes with points attached that penalize students for not conforming to surface-level conventions or unexplained criteria (like "logical argument"). Here is one example. Key Practices: Distribute rubrics along with the assignment prompt so that students know in advance what your feedback and assessment will center on. Take time to discuss the rubric in class. If there is time, review it with an anonymized sample student paper (alternatively, share a sample paper with criteria-driven feedback written on it). Rubrics should mirror the assignment prompt ; they should not include criteria that students do not expect or that they have not learned about. Settle on no more than five or six criteria so your students do not get overwhelmed. What are the most essential elements of this particular assignment? Try to provide "higher order" criteria that really matter to the genre or the learning goals of the assignment. Criteria that address word count or mechanical correctness are not particularly helpful. As we discuss in the next section on antiracist approaches to assessment, you can even ask students to help collaborate on a rubric.  See next section for details. Key Benefits: Grading writing is time-intensive, and rubrics save time . Having a set of clear criteria with designated points reduces the time you need to spend belaboring various aspects of a student’s work and the letter or number grade it has earned. Only focus on student work insofar as it does or does not fulfill the assessment criteria. Rubrics help reduce (perceived or actual) grading bias . Without explicit criteria, it is easier to be guided by bias when grading work that has fewer clear-cut signals than a multiple-choice test. When students clearly understand how they are being graded, it is  easier for them to succeed and achieve the learning goals for an assignment. The UW Center for Teaching & Learning also has a resource on developing and using rubrics that includes some example templates. Antiracist Approaches to Writing Assessment A growing body of scholarship is dedicated to antiracist writing assessment, and the richness of that work is too expansive to share comprehensively here. There are a few practices we would like to feature here, however, as starting points for antiracist praxis.  Make visible and de-center deficit language ideologies . A deficit language ideology is a belief (explicit or tacit) that conformance to a particular language standard shows intelligence and worth, whereas lack of conformance speaks to a lack of intelligence and worth. This does not mean ignoring language use; on the contrary, having inquiry-driven discussions about language in your field can help surface language ideologies. On an even simpler level, posing a question about your student's language use in a writing assignment can have a stronger impact than correcting it. Co-create assessment criteria.  Enlist your students in the creation of an assignment rubric, based on the prompt and on sample writing from former students or from the field. Asking students to identify what traits make a successful scientific research article (say) can help them internalize those traits, and it gives them ownership of the writing process. You can do this in class or discussion section, or you can ask students to read sample texts on their own time and propose rubric criteria as a homework assignment. Then incorporate their suggestions into your rubric as appropriate. We have done this with excellent results: often students will identify important criteria we had not thought of.  Explore the use of grade contracts or ungrading . Grade contracts (sometimes called labor-based grade contracts) award credit for labor and process, rather than the quality of finished products. Ungrading offers qualitative instead of quantitative evaulation. These are approaches that mitigate against unintended bias in more traditional grading systems, and are designed to encourage students to take more risks in their writing and have greater ownership over their learning. Taking on approaches like these can feel intimidating because, while we all want to teach in ways that are socially just, it is also scary if we feel we have to upend everything we know about teaching. However, we encourage you to take it one small step at a time. You can practice developing your own higher-order assessment criteria for a while before inviting students to collaborate on them. You can experiment with a grade contract for just one assignment before implementing it throughout your course. And so on. Feedback from our own students shows us that even small efforts have big impacts. Further reading: Council of Writing Program Administrators' statement on antiracist writing assessment , with bibliography. Targeted Commenting Offering targeted commentary on student writing is essential for both you and your students. Commenting on a student paper can feel like going down a rabbit hole. We may feel it is our duty to point out every little error, but if you did that you would spend way more time than you have to spare. Limiting the time you spend and the amount of feedback you give is the only way to stay sane.  Here are some tips to regulate the amount of time you spend grading: Set a timer for yourself if you find it difficult to pull yourself away (15-20 minutes can be a reasonable amount of time for a 4-5 page essay, though of course it depends on the nature of the paper and on how many students you have). You may find it best not to hold a pen or to allow yourself to type marginal comments as you read, and just wait until you have read the whole draft. When offering global commentary at the end of the draft, limit yourself to a few sentences about a small number of key issues explicitly drawn from the assessment criteria. Offering targeted commentary is also (perhaps counterintuitively) better for students. It enables them to focus only on a couple substantive issues in revision; if you cover their drafts with the proverbial red ink, they can become overwhelmed-- remember what it is like to have your own writing critiqued! It is a vulnerable experience. Make sure that the key issues you want your students to focus on are clearly signaled, and are explicitly tied to the assessment criteria (discussed previously in the “What is a Rubric?” section). That is to say, if you ask your student to focus in their revision on summarizing source material more succinctly, then this should be something that will be covered in the rubric, and that will count toward the final grade. Here is an example of commentary that is well-intended but not well-focused, followed by a more targeted response: Promising start, Hannah. Your central argument is clearly stated, and is grounded in one of the anthropological frameworks we’ve covered in class. Transitions between paragraphs are tough to follow; it feels like you jump from one topic to another without clearly showing your reader where you are going. Are you planning to use the Smith book as one of your sources? It’s not required, but I think it would strengthen your argument. Please focus on run-on sentences! Also number your pages. Etc… Promising start, Hannah. Here are some suggestions for revision that will help you better fulfill the criteria described in the rubric: Argument: This is one of the paper’s greatest strengths. It is clearly stated, and is grounded in one of the anthropological frameworks we’ve covered in class, as the prompt requires. Are you planning to use the Smith book as one of your sources? It’s not required, but I think it would strengthen your argument. Structure: One element of structure it’s important to consider is that of transitions. Transitions between your paragraphs are tough to follow; it feels like you jump from one topic to another without clearly showing your reader relationships between them. Please think about how to close and open your paragraphs so as to tie ideas together and improve cohesion-- a tutor at the OWRC may be able to help you with this. The Ever-Present Question About Grammar Here we offer some reflections on some frequently asked questions about grading grammar, mechanics, and usage. Should I correct my students’ grammar in their writing? Many instructors feel that if they assign writing, they are obligated to “correct” students’ “grammar.” This is understandable—most of us were graded on “grammar” and other sentence-level issues when we were in school. Yet research on how students learn has more recently pointed to the inefficacy of “correcting grammar” for a host of reasons: "Grammar” is often used as a blanket term that obscures actual writing choices, such as language or communication conventions unique to a particular discipline/field; citation issues; typos; poor use of Spellcheck; etc. Compressing these complex and varied issues under the singular term “grammar” decreases students' ability to notice and address them in the future. Unless you are a scholar of language, the complexities of English “grammar” are most likely outside of your area of expertise (they are outside of ours!). Instructors have often unwittingly given students false and conflicting messages about usage, and these messages hurt students who use them to guide their writing in other classes or disciplines. One common example of this is the use of active/passive voice. While you may prefer one or the other, remember there is no universal truth about which is better. Rather, authorial voice should be a consideration informed by the particular genre, audience, and context. Teaching & learning scholar and former UW Writing Director John Webster has written extensively about effective ways to respond to student writing and why focusing on sentence-level errors actually distracts and detracts from students’ learning. In summary, if you feel you must grade students on a particular issue of mechanics, make sure that that issue is explicitly tied in with the learning goals of the prompt. Also make sure that you teach the particular issue you will be grading them on. But what if my students turn in writing that is full of grammar errors? A key point that Webster makes in light of grammar concerns: Perhaps most important: as a general (and research supported) rule, the more challenging students find an assignment to be, the more surface-level error shows up in their drafts. This is normal. The human mind has only so much capacity. When students are straining their mental capacities simply to understand how to work with the concepts in your course, many will have little energy left over when the paper is due to take care for surface level error. If you are finding your students making many sentence-level errors, this is likely because their brains are full from attempting to grasp and process the new concepts from your course. Additionally, a psychological theory called stereotype threat describes a situation where people fear they may be judged for conforming to particular stereotype (e.g., international students may fear judgment of their language use). That anxiety can become self-fulfilling; distracted by their anticipation of penalties, they may commit a greater number of "errors." De-centering language use in your prompt, in your rubric, and in your class culture gives your students the freedom to focus on ideas instead of mechanics. But good writing is important to my field! Yes! Effective writing and communication are key to most fields. And while you may not be an expert on the complexities of English grammar, if you have written and published a lot you are most likely an expert on what makes writing effective in your field. Importantly, the characteristics of “good” or “effective” writing in one field differ dramatically from those in another. If you want students to learn how to write effectively in your field, discuss these characteristics with them, sharing examples from key texts in your discipline. Then, if you want to grade on students’ use of these in their papers, make sure that those criteria are explicitly built into your grading rubric. How can I teach my students to edit or proofread their own work? Given that students are more likely to make spelling errors, typos, and other common writing mistakes while they are working with new/complex ideas, make sure that your students carve out time and space at least a day or two after they have finished drafting the big ideas in their writing to proofread. It is often difficult to see these issues right after we are finished writing, since our brains are still focused on the ideas. You can add (optional) deadlines for this in the assignment prompt and/or ask students to bring a penultimate draft to class to share for peer review. Students can benefit from reviewing some editing or proofreading techniques as well (e.g., read the paper out loud, read the paper backward). The University of North Carolina Writing Center has a helpful page with strategies for editing and proofreading that you could share with students. Search Utah State University: Grading assignments in canvas. On This Page Enter Score on Grades Page View online submission and submit a score in speedgrader, sort and name display options, annotation tools, grade entry, use a rubric, additional feedback, moving to next student, more resources. If students aren't submitting anything, like for an in-class activity or participation points, you will need to create a "no submission" assignment on the Assignments page. Then, you can go right to the Grades page and enter a grade for each student, just as you would in spreadsheet software. Enter "EX" (excused) for students who do not need to complete the assignment so that the score won't count as a "0" when it comes time to calculate a final grade. When students submit artifacts online (text, document, picture, etc.) you will use the SpeedGrader to grade the assignment. The SpeedGrader will show a preview of the student submission and give you a box to enter the score and a comments field. You can access the SpeedGrader in a couple of ways: On the Canvas Dashboard, click on the assignment title in the To Do list In the course, click on the assignment title in the To Do list on the home page In the course, click on the Assignment page, then the title of the assignment, and click SpeedGrader In the course, click on Grades , then the three dots, and SpeedGrader Once you are in the SpeedGrader, you can sort the submissions alphabetically, by the date of submission, or by submission status and hide the student names. If students submitted documents for the assignment, you have the option to use a pointer, highlighter, text entry, text strikethrough, or box outline to provide feedback. When using these tools, be sure to add a comment for students to view the feedback. Here is sample verbiage you might use: Please be sure to view the comments on the body of your paper by clicking on the "View Feedback" link from the assignment page. If you prefer to use annotation tools using an application on your computer, you can download the file and upload the edited version. For example, you could download the submitted file and open it into a word processing software like Microsoft Word and use the Track Changes feature. There, you can save your document with the annotations and upload them to SpeedGrader by using the File Attachment button underneath the comment box on the right-hand panel of the Speedgrader. Enter the score in the grade field on the right panel. You can use a rubric to grade the assignment. See Rubrics for more details. You can provide additional feedback to students in the form of comments, an uploaded file, video, or audio recording. You can move to the next student by clicking on the left arrow at the top of the page, or use the dropdown menu to select a specific student. Canvas guide: How do I use SpeedGrader? Canvas guide: How do I post grades for an assignment in the Gradebook?   Grade Calculator  No. Score / Out Of Grade (%) Weight (%) 1 Important Notes Inputting data in our grade calculator. Your Personalized Grading and Feedback Assistant TimelyGrader empowers instructors to streamline their feedback and grading processes through the seamless integration of AI - saving them time and improving the quality of feedback given to students. "I chose TimelyGrader to streamline my grading, and its effectiveness was clear from the improved quality of student work!" ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY Supporting instructors and students throughout the entire assignment Grade faster and more objectively. TimelyGrader helps instructors cut down on the time they spend grading while ensuring that grading decisions are consistent and objective. “The grading was eased and helped my life be a little bit more balanced.” Kelley Anderson, Assistant Professor at College of Charleston Boost student success with more feedback opportunities No more scale or time constraints on giving students feedback - with TimelyGrader instructors can provide additional opportunities for feedback without increasing their workload. “I really appreciated all the feedback in this class.” Anonymous Student What TimelyGrader users are saying TimelyGrader provides feedback on things that I normally wouldn't catch and organizes all the feedback in a very comprehensive manner that I would never have the time for. I'm definitely more hesitant when it comes to AI, but I'm really impressed with what I've seen when it comes to TimelyGrader. I love how TimleyGrader integrates AI into the human process. I want to provide students with more feedback but I don't have the time, AI feedback and grading is going to be incredibly valuable for this. I would absolutely use Ensightful again to improve team projects. Ensightful helped me to identify team problems early on in a project and helped teams develop team skills, communicate better, and to achieve higher performance. Dr. Wayne Rawcliffe Ensightful helped me pinpoint major issues for teams where students were not contributing and enabled me to address such behaviors in week two rather than finding out about it in week seven. Elizabeth Mays Why instructors love TimelyGrader "TimelyGrader provides feedback on things that I normally wouldn't catch and organizes all the feedback in a very comprehensive manner that I would never have the time for." API integrations with Canvas and D2L TimelyGrader is currently fully integrated with both Canvas and D2L! Stay tuned for Blackboard and Moodle coming soon. Accessibility and Security TimelyGrader is committed to ensuring that every student has equal access to our learning tools. By aligning with these globally recognized standards, we guarantee a seamless and barrier-free learning experience that empower both students and instructors. From the beginning, TimelyGrader has been designed to fully meet WCAG AA standArds. We offer a VPAT report that outlines TimelyGrader's adherence to AA standards. Completed and passed multiple instances of the Big Ten Academic Alliance questionnaire. HECVAT results are available upon request, ensuring transparent and trusted use. Example of navigating TimelyGrader with keyboard navigation Try TimelyGrader for free today or see how it works Get the latest updates in your inbox. Enhancing education with AI-powered grading and feedback. Grade Calculators Weighted Grade Calculator Assignments Assignment 1 Assignment 2 Assignment 3 Assignment 4 Assignment 5 Assignment 6 Assignment 7 Assignment 8 Assignment 9 Assignment 10 Your Grade Average: To determine what grade you need to get on your remaining assignments (or on your final exam), enter the total weight of all of your class assignments (often the total weight is 100). Then enter the desired grade you would like to get in the class. Enter Desired Grade Enter Class Total Weight Instructions You can use the calculator above to calculate your weighted grade average. For each assignment, enter the grade you received and the weight of the assignment. If you have more than 10 assignments, use the "Add Row" button to add additional input fields. Once you have entered your data, press the "calculate" button and you will see the calculated average grade in the results area. If you want to calculate the average grade you need on your remaining assignments (or on your final exam) in order to get a certain grade in the class, enter the desired grade you would like to get in the class. Then enter the total weight of all your class assignments. Often the total weight of all class assignments is equal to 100, but this is not always the case. Press either the “Calculate” button or the “Update” button and you will see your average grade for the class and the results will be displayed in the results area. Video Instructions How to calculate weighted grade average? First multiple the grade received by the weight of the assignment. Repeat this for each completed assignment. Then add each of the calculated values from step 1 together. Next add the weight of all the completed assignments together. Finally, divide the calculated value from step 2 above by the value calculated from step 3. This gives you the weighted grade average. Weighted Grade Formula Weighted Grade = (w 1 x g 1 + w 2 x g 2 + w 3 x g 3 + …) / (w 1 + w 2 + w 3 + …) Example Calculation Here is an example. Let's say you received a 90% on your first assignment and it was worth 10% of the class grade. Then let's assume you took a test and received an 80% on it. The test was worth 20% of your grade. To calculate your average grade, follow these steps: Multiple each grade by its weight. In this example, you received a 90% on the first assignment and it was worth 10%. So multiply 90 x 10 = 900. You also received an 80% on the test and it was worth 20% of the class grade. So multiply 80 x 20 = 1600. Add the calculated values from step 1 together. We now have 900 + 1600 = 2500. Add the weight of all the completed assignments together. To do this, add 10% for the first assignment and 20% for the second assignment. That gives us 10 + 20 = 30. Finally, divide the value from step 2 by the value from step 3. That gives us 2500 / 30 = 83.33. Therefore our weighted grade average is 83.33%. You Might Like These Too Middle School GPA Calculator Semester GPA Calculator Test Grade Calculator High School GPA Calculator Without Credits How can we improve this page. Let us do the math... Grade calculator, use this simple ez grading calculator to find quiz, test and assignment scores:, grading chart:. # Wrong Grade 1 90 2 80 3 70 4 60 5 50 6 40 7 30 8 20 9 10 10 0 How to Convert (Calculate) Your GPA to a 4.0 Scale Search for colleges using your gpa. High schools often report GPA (grade point average) on a 4.0 scale. The top grade is an A, which equals 4.0. You calculate your overall GPA by averaging the scores of all your classes. This is a common scale used at most colleges, and many high schools also use it. To convert your GPA to a 4.0 scale: Letter Grade Percent Grade 4.0 Scale A+ 97-100 A 93-96 A- 90-92 B+ 87-89 B 83-86 B- 80-82 C+ 77-79 C 73-76 C- 70-72 D+ 67-69 D 65-66 E/F Below 65 The chart is an example to assist in understanding the components to calculate a GPA. Your school may use a different grading scale. Keep in mind that your high school reports your GPA to your prospective colleges. The GPA listed on your high school transcript might not be what is used by college admissions, since there is a lot of variation in high school grading scales, additional points added for honors, advanced, AP, IB courses. For admissions, many colleges will recalculate student GPA so there is consistency/equity across applicants based on institutional standards and may not include all high school coursework or weights. Contact your high school counselor or colleges on your list to learn more about GPA and use in the admissions process. You can also look up the academic requirements of your favorite colleges using   College Search  and see how your GPA compares to students who got in and enrolled. What are letter grades and how do they convert into percentages? Common examples of grade conversion are: A+ (97–100), A (93–96), A- (90–92), B+ (87–89), B (83–86), B- (80–82), C+ (77–79), C (73–76), C- (70–72), D+ (67–69), D (65–66), D- (below 65). However, the way letter grades convert to percentages can vary slightly from college to college and may even vary between departments in the same college. How do you calculate your GPA in high school? To calculate your high school GPA, add together your grades on the 4.0 scale after converting them from letter grades, and divide the sum by the number of classes you are taking. Additionally, many high schools use a secondary GPA system called a "weighted GPA system." The weighted GPA system adds extra weight to courses at the Honors, AP, and IB levels. The weighted GPA system can vary between school districts, so talk to your counselor about how your particular high school’s weighted GPA system works. What is the average GPA? The average GPA across all U.S. high schools is 3.0 while the average GPA across all U.S. colleges is 3.1. These numbers will vary significantly between school districts and colleges. If you’re wondering what the average GPA is for the college’s you are interested in, you can see the GPA range for admitted students on BigFuture’s college profiles. High School Classes Colleges Look For Five things to know about applying to college, how and why to take advanced high school classes, character counts: what are colleges looking for, stand out in high school, college planning for seniors. This season-by-season handout guides 12th-graders through their last year before college. College Planning Calendar for Juniors Share this season-by-season guide to college planning with 11th-graders College Planning for Ninth- and 10th-Graders This short handout provides freshmen and sophomores with a step-by-step college planning guide. Related Articles for Education Google Classroom Google Workspace Admin Google Cloud Where teaching and learning come together Google Classroom helps educators create engaging learning experiences they can personalize, manage, and measure. Part of Google Workspace for Education, it empowers educators to enhance their impact and prepare students for the future. Contact sales Sign in to Classroom 150M people worldwide use Google Classroom Google Classroom is designed with feedback from the educational community, influencing the development of new features that let educators focus on teaching and students focus on learning. Enrich and personalize learning Drive student agency with tools that meet students where they are – and build skills for their future. Premium features that inspire new ways of teaching and learning Power student potential. Create interactive assignments, even from existing PDFs, that provide real-time feedback and individual guidance with prompts and hints with the help of AI. Help students develop literacy skills Assign differentiated reading activities using the Classroom integration with Read Along, a fun, speech-based tool from Google that helps students independently build their reading skills, while giving educators insight into their progress. Reinforce concepts with self-paced learning Assign interactive questions for YouTube videos, giving students real-time feedback as they move through a lesson, while viewing insights into their performance. Enhance lessons with popular integrations Easily find, add, use and grade content with add-ons from popular EdTech tools, right within Classroom. Make learning more personal and foster student agency Support differentiated instruction. Customize classwork for every student and support them with real-time feedback and easy communication tools. Foster academic integrity Encourage original thinking and identify potential plagiarism with originality reports that compare student work against billions of web pages and over 40 million books. Make learning accessible and inclusive Help students customize their learning environment to reduce barriers to learning. Prepare students for the future Encourage organization and time management skills with interactive to-do lists, automatic due dates, and industry-leading productivity tools. Explore all features Amplify instruction with tools that simplify everyday tasks Boost instructional time with tools purpose-built for teaching, productivity, and collaboration. Premium features that elevate teaching Support originality with plagiarism detection. Help students integrate citations and avoid unintentional plagiarism with unlimited originality reports and a school-owned repository of past work. Streamline lesson planning Create a link to your class, then share it with peers in your organization, so they can easily preview, select, and import high-quality classwork into their classes. Inform instruction with data-driven insights Classroom analytics provide educators with insights and visibility into how students turn in, perform on, and engage with assignments, so educators can make informed decisions about the best way to provide support. Simplify and connect grading workflows Sync gradebooks to seamlessly manage and export grades from Classroom to your school’s SIS – available for PowerSchool (coming soon), Infinite Campus, Skyward SMS, Skyward Qmlativ, and Follett Aspen. Educators can customize grading periods (e.g., quarters, semesters, terms) and grading scales (e.g., letter, numeric) in their class settings to align to their school’s grading structure or system, reduce errors for SIS grade export and allow educators to more easily filter and analyze assignments. Tools designed for seamless teaching Save time on everyday tasks. Assign, grade, and provide feedback across multiple classes, and even on the go with iOS and Android versions of the Classroom app. Elevate communication, collaboration, and connection Connect with students and parents instantly with embedded chat and meeting tools while leveraging built-in chat and comment features to leave students feedback as they’re working. Grade more efficiently Assess student progress with customizable rubrics that students can see, and save time with efficient feedback and grade export tools. Get creative with hundreds of apps Hundreds of EdTech apps integrate with Classroom to spark creativity and enable more opportunities for learning. Operate with solutions designed to gain visibility, insights, and control Create learning environments that are easier to manage and support educators and students with connected, safer tools. Premium features to support your organization and foster stronger learning outcomes Make data-driven decisions. Gain visibility into everything from class performance to individual student assignment completion with Classroom analytics (coming soon), or export Classroom logs to BigQuery to analyze adoption, engagement, and more. Distribute high-quality class templates to educators Easily share high-quality class templates so educators in your organization can preview and import classwork into their own classes. Virtually visit classes to support teachers and students Designated education leaders and staff can temporarily access classes to support educators, manage substitute teachers, see information for guardian conversations, and more. Manage classes at scale Create classes automatically and sync class lists from your student information system (SIS) with Clever . A secure, reliable, and extensible platform for school communities of all sizes Benefit from industry-leading privacy and security. Classroom uses the same infrastructure as other Google Workspace products, meeting rigorous privacy standards with regular third-party audits. Access a centralized Admin console with controlled entry and insights into performance and security. Stay flexible and reliable Scale your school community with a global network with full-stack security and 99% uptime. Extend and scale Classroom Integrate with your student information system (SIS) and customize Classroom to work for your unique needs with APIs. Support staff and enhance collaboration Empower educators with instructional resources , professional development programs , and online training courses , available at no cost. Level up your Classroom with apps Discover a world of apps that seamlessly integrate with Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education. Explore App Hub How Classroom can make a difference for you Education leaders, it administrators. Classroom can be learned in minutes and serves all types of learners and educators, regardless of their tech savviness. Empower educators, and encourage adoption and proficiency with new tools and techniques, with a broad range of resources. Get a quick overview of the benefits of Classroom Read customer stories Explore trainings and resources for educators 40+ ways to use Google Workspace for Education paid editions Learn about sustainability in Google for Education products Teachers can immediately set up classes, easily create coursework, distribute it to the whole class, and grade it efficiently and transparently. Find an educator community Download the Classroom user guide View product guides Admins have as much control as they need while they access and analyze their data for insights and choose from a range of upgrade options for additional capabilities to fit their specific needs. Get started with the paid editions of Workspace for Education View product demos Explore 40+ ways to use Google Workspace for Education paid editions Learn more about Google for Education security and privacy Guardian's Guide to Google Classroom Need more information about Classroom? Visit the Help Center Bring all of your tools together with Google Workspace for Education Google Workspace for Education empowers your school community with easy-to-use tools that elevate teaching, learning, collaboration, and productivity – all on one secure platform. Explore Google Workspace for Education 150 million users Active around the world, ready to transform your school, you're now viewing content for a different region.. For content more relevant to your region, we suggest: Sign up here for updates, insights, resources, and more. Grades 6-12 School Leaders NEW: Classroom Clean-Up/Set-Up Email Course! 🧽 AI for Teachers: 33 Tools To Make Your Life Easier in 2024 These AI tools for teachers help you save time for the important stuff. While ChatGPT is soaking up all the glory right now, there are plenty of AI tools for teachers that should be on every educator’s radar. From personalizing learning experiences to automating administrative tasks, AI tools have the potential to transform teaching and learning. Although some teachers are hesitant to embrace AI , there are numerous productive ways to use AI tools like ChatGPT in the classroom . Try these options to see how AI for teachers can save you time, effort, and energy. Goal: I want an easy way to grade multiple-choice assessments. Scantron machines have made grading multiple-choice tests a breeze, but they require you to have access to special equipment. Akindi does away with that, allowing you to create and score bubble sheet assessments from any computer with a scanner. It can also record scores automatically and sync with your LMS. (Contact Akindi for pricing.) Goal: I want to make fun animated videos. Add interest to your lessons with AI-generated animated videos! Customize your characters, choose a style, and make it all your own. Kids can use this, too, to create fun book reports and presentations. (Free trial, plans start at $12.50/month.) Bing Image Creator Goal: i want to encourage creativity.. Bing Image Creator is an awesome AI tool that combines existing images from the Internet to generate custom composite images. It can be used in the classroom to create visuals for presentations and design custom graphics. This is a great resource for spicing up your creative-writing routine by having your students create unique characters for storytelling. (Free) Goal: I want to give students help even when I’m not there. When students are working on homework or independent study, they sometimes get stuck and don’t have anyone to ask for help. Enter Brainly! This AI learning companion can provide explanations, talk students through equations, and more. As a teacher, this tool can give you alternate ways to explain things to students too. ( Free for teachers ; student plans start at $9.99 per month.) Canva Magic Studio Goal: i want help creating presentations and videos.. Canva has several AI tools that are great for the classroom. Magic Design’s AI helps you build slides and other visual aids from text and images. Trouble coming up with the words? Magic Write can provide them. This rich collection has so many possibilities for education! (Free for teachers, students, and schools) Goal: I want an all-in-one suite of AI tools designed specifically for education. Cognii’s AI learning platform includes a virtual learning assistant, writing assessment tool, data analytics, and more. These are the types of thoughtfully designed tools that make AI for teachers truly useful and meaningful. (Contact Cognii for pricing.) Goal: I want to create standards-aligned assessments. Conker helps teachers create multiple-choice, read-and-respond, and fill-in-the-blank quizzes. It will also read questions out loud for students, and it integrates with the Canvas LMS. (Free basic plan, paid plans with extra features start at $3.99/month.) Goal: I want to streamline planning and prep. With Education Copilot, educators can access an unlimited amount of AI-based assistance to virtually streamline all areas of the teaching craft. With this one-stop shop, you can access curriculum-aligned content, generate activities, and track student performance. Try any or all of its handy features to boost your planning efficiency. ($9/month; school and district pricing available) Goal: I want to create interactive presentations. Make your slide presentations interactive by letting Curipod use AI to incorporate polls, drawings, questions, and more. Students respond on their own devices, with results shown on the main screen. Kids stay engaged, and the learning increases. (Free basic plan; premium plan starts at $15/month.) Goal: I want help differentiating learning activities. Differentiated learning is key to helping all students in your classroom succeed, but it’s not always easy to come up with new ideas. Diffit can help, using AI to provide “just right” instructional materials based on standards, grade levels, and more. (Contact Diffit for pricing.) Goal: I want an all-in-one AI tool for teachers. Formative offers so many ways to use AI for teachers. For instance, you can add time-stamped questions to YouTube videos, detect copy-and-paste answers, and transform a PDF or Google Doc to an auto-graded quiz. And that’s just the start! (Free basic plan; unlock more features with paid plans starting at $15/month.) Goal: I want to boost my students’ writing skills. This awesome AI platform provides real-time grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style suggestions for any written content. You can leverage Grammarly to streamline essay grading or to facilitate independent or peer-review practices for written assignments. (Free basic plan, premium starts at $12/month.) Hello History Goal: i want to bring history to life for my students.. This one-of-a-kind AI app facilitates lifelike conversations with historical figures. Students can get a detailed personal perspective on life, history, and the world from some of the most influential figures of all time. (Monthly subscription starts at $5.99.) Goal: I want an AI-powered teaching assistant. Teachers already love Khan Academy for its incredible selection of free courses and lessons. Now Khanmigo is here to make your life even easier, with AI tools like an exit ticket generator, directions writer, reading leveler, and so much more. And it’s all free for teachers! (Free) MagicSchool Goal: i want a one-stop shop for ai tools.. No matter what type of AI for teachers you’re looking for, MagicSchool probably has it! Their suite of more than 60 tools covers pretty much everything teachers do. Plus, the interface has built-in training to help you use it easily and discover everything it can do for you. (Free, with extra features available starting at $12.99/month) Parlay Ideas Goal: i want to spark student discussions.. Students participate in discussions virtually using this written roundtable tool. Teachers can use the AI-driven features to generate better discussion questions to get everything started. It’s an ideal tool for Socratic seminars ! (Free robust basic plan, with premium plan available) Goal: I want a smarter search engine. Tired of wading through endless Google results to find what you’re looking for? Not sure how to word a good search to find what you need? Try Perplexity! You can simply pose your question or request in natural language and get a clear answer. You can even ask for more information or clarification. Just remember to verify your answer with a trusted source, since AI can make mistakes. (Free, with paid upgrades available) Goal: I want to give students a safe place to talk about their feelings. Chatbots can be a bit impersonal, but Pi was designed to be the “friendly” chatbot. It’s especially helpful for talking through feelings or worries, since it’s completely anonymous. Pi can also help with homework questions, research, and more. (Free) QuestionWell Goal: i want to create interesting kahoot questions.. This tool can generate questions from a variety of sources and even add images. Then, you can export them to Kahoot, Quizizz, or other learning platforms. (Free basic plan, premium plans start at $7/month.) Goal: I want to improve my phrasing. Have you ever felt like you’re just repeating yourself in an effort to get your point across, when what you really need is a new way to say it? Try an AI paraphrasing tool like Quillbot, which can sharpen and clarify your written communications. Oh, and it works in multiple languages too! (Free basic plan, with premium plans available) Goal: I want to generate quality assessment questions. Writing strong assessments is an important way to measure student progress, but it can be time-consuming. Let AI for teachers help you out with Quizbot, which can generate questions from text, video, audio, and even images. If offers a wide array of question types, and makes it easy to export your assessments to learning management systems or other tools. (Plans start at $8/month.) Quizlet Plus Goal: i want to help my students use their notes to study more effectively.. Feed in your notes, and Quizlet Plus will create flash cards and other review materials automatically. You can also use the chatbot feature to quiz you—it will analyze your answers, prompt for more information, and coach you to a better understanding of a topic. ($7.99/month or $35.99/year) Goal: I want to save time making slides. SlidesAI automatically generates slide templates, recommends appropriate fonts and color schemes, and provides guidance on optimizing the overall visual impact of presentations. Simply enter the text that you want to create your presentation from, customize the look, and voilà! (Free) Socratic by Google Goal: i want to offer my students free homework help.. Socratic is an AI app (available for iOS and Android) designed to assist students with their academic questions. It provides helpful step-by-step explanations, relevant resources, and content to help students enhance their understanding. (Free) Goal: I want to help struggling readers. This is one of the best AI-based text-to-speech tools. Emergent readers can follow along with the text as it is read aloud, helping them to better understand the content and improve their comprehension skills. Older students with reading challenges can use it to help with reading in any subject, allowing them to focus on the content rather than the reading itself. (Free basic plan; premium plan is $139/year.) Speaker Coach Goal: i want to be a better public speaker.. Whether you want to brush up your own slideshow presentation skills or help your students improve theirs, Speaker Coach can help. This AI tool can detect and evaluate your vocabulary, pacing, tone, and more. (Free) Summarize.tech Goal: i want a summary of videos.. Doing some research on a topic and need to save time? Not sure if a video is worth assigning for your class? Try this AI tool that summarizes the content for you. (Free basic plan, premium upgrade available) Goal: I want to give my world language students a way to practice chatting. The best way to become fluent in a new language is to practice, practice, practice! Students can use this AI chatbot to have conversations about just about anything in more than 50 languages. It offers real-time feedback on their responses too. (Basic plan includes 10 minutes of chat per day for free; education licenses available) Turnitin Similarity Goal: i want to catch potential plagiarism and ai-generated work.. While we wish we could always trust students, the truth is teachers need good plagiarism and AI detectors these days, and this is one of our favorites. Encourage students to use it too, so they can avoid accidental plagiarism, which is surprisingly common. (Similarity is part of the wider suite of Turnitin products; contact them for pricing.) Goal: I want an AI tool just for ELA teachers. Build lessons from scratch, find new writing prompts and essay ideas, create vocab lists and activities, and more. ELA teachers can find just about anything they need here. (Basic free plan; Pro starts at $11.95/month.) Goal: I want to highlight key concepts in videos. Annotate and add comments to videos you’ve assigned students to watch independently. This tool is awesome for guided note-taking—just annotate some key ideas throughout a video to prompt students toward noting the important stuff. (Free) Wolfram Alpha Goal: i want to provide step-by-step help for math equations.. This AI tool for education provides answers and step-by-step solutions to complex concepts. Primarily used for math, this tool can essentially coach your students through any math problem using familiar, replicable methods; it acts almost as a tutor or academic coach. Use it for assessment prep, homework help, and more. (Free) Goal: I want to create quizzes quickly. Input text or even a URL and this AI tool for teachers will generate quiz questions in a snap. You can review and customize the questions, which are available as multiple-choice, true-or-false, and fill-in-the-blank. (Free plan offers three quizzes per month; $4.99/month for unlimited access and improved features.) How do you use AI for teachers? Come share your ideas and ask for advice in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, get your students using ai with these fun, free activities .. You Might Also Like 8 Things Teachers Need if We Want To Save Education in 2024 There are solutions—but we have to get moving. Continue Reading Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. 5335 Gate Parkway, Jacksonville, FL 32256 Engage your Musical Journey: Assignment 1 Grading Rubric Arts & Humanities 298 IMAGES Grading Assignments : Gradelink Support Community FREE 18+ Grading Worksheet Templates in PDF Quick Guide: 4 Keys to Grading Success in Gradelink SIS Moodle Gradebook Grading Rubric for Written Assignments Assignment Grading Rubric VIDEO How grading assignments be in 2024: Grading Assignments Grading Assignments D2L BRIGHTSPACE CREATE DROPBOX ASSIGNMENTS, TURNITIN.COM, AND GRADING RUBRIC Class Assignments, Category Weight, and Grading Setting for Theory Courses in CMS Grading Assignments COMMENTS The Ultimate Guide to Grading Student Work An instructor may choose to make the results of an exam worth 50 percent of a student's total class grade, while assignments account for 25 percent and participation marks are worth another 25 percent. Grading on a curve: This system adjusts student grades to ensure that a test or assignment has the proper distribution throughout the class ... Grading Student Work Use different grading scales for different assignments. Grading scales include: letter grades with pluses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.) 100-point numerical scale (for exams, certain types of projects, etc.) check +, check, check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.) PDF Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment Assignments need to be made worth grading. Grading should not be an afterthought; it should shape the entire process from the first moment a course is planned. ^The first step in course planning is to make sure that the assignments and tests assess the learning you and your students most want to achieve _ (17). Scoring & Grading Practices The grade for the assignment may include some combination of the score for the drafts, the final version, and the amount of improvement the students made based on the feedback provided. A more controversial approach is basing grades on effort when students try really hard day after day but still cannot complete their assignments well. These ... Gradescope Grade paper-based, digital, and code assignments in half the time. It pays off: saves time overall, prevents cheating, and frees your office of old exams. Give detailed feedback while maintaining consistency with a flexible rubric. Send grades to students with a click or export them to your own gradebook. Set up grading Adding the category scores (37.5 + 47.5) gives the student an overall grade of 85%. Tip: Assignments with a grade set to "Excused" are removed from a student's grade calculation. For example, if a student has 5 assignments with a score of 100%, but doesn't turn in one assignment that's set to "Excused," the student will still keep an ... Assessment Rubrics Assessment Rubrics. A rubric is commonly defined as a tool that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing criteria, and for each criteria, describing levels of quality (Andrade, 2000; Arter & Chappuis, 2007; Stiggins, 2001). Criteria are used in determining the level at which student work meets expectations. Tips for Grading Efficiently and Fairly Ten Tips for Fair and Efficient Grading. Develop clear assignment expectations before the assignment is handed out and share them with your students. Use a rubric to specify grading criteria. Grade all responses to the same question together. Anonymize assignments when grading. Skim a sample of the assignment submissions before grading. Grade & return an assignment You can enter a grade either for the number of points or if you have grading scales set up, based on the levels on the grading scale. For example, if you have letter grades set up in your class and you assign a 10 point assignment, under "Grade," you can: Enter 8. Enter Good. Select Good 8/10 from the dropdown menu. Grading + Rubrics Before grading assignments, consider what kinds of work your students are asked to perform on that assignment (answering questions on a quiz, responding to essay prompts, writing a paper, group work, etc.), and note which criteria you would need to see met for you to consider it to be a good performance on that work. This can increase your ... Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates Step 4: Define the assignment criteria. Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help. Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria: 15 Helpful Scoring Rubric Examples for All Grades and Subjects Each rating is assigned a point value, and the total number of points earned determines the overall grade for the assignment. Though they're more time-intensive to create, analytic rubrics actually save time while grading. Teachers can simply circle or highlight any relevant phrases in each rating, and add a comment or two if needed. Google Assignments, your new grading companion Assignments brings together the capabilities of Google Docs, Drive and Search into a new tool for collecting and grading student work. It helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks. You can use Assignments as a standalone ... Grading Essays Grade for Learning Objectives. Know what the objective of the assignment is and grade according to a standard (a rubric) that assesses precisely that. If the purpose of the assignment is to analyze a process, focus on the analysis in the essay. If the paper is unreadable, however, consult with the professor and other GSIs about how to proceed. Creating Grading Rubrics for Writing Assignments Creating grading rubrics, or grids, is a typical way to do this. Having received the criteria with an assignment, students are able to write toward specific goals. Later, when they look at their grades, they can see at a glance the strengths and weaknesses of their work. Instructors are able to grade according to customized descriptive criteria ... Grade Calculator Grade Calculator. Use this calculator to find out the grade of a course based on weighted averages. This calculator accepts both numerical as well as letter grades. It also can calculate the grade needed for the remaining assignments in order to get a desired grade for an ongoing course. Assignment/Exam. On Grading Writing On Grading Writing. When we imagine grading our students' written assignments, many of us visualize a single letter or number, perhaps accompanied by a few sentences of commentary, written on a student's final draft (or typed into a box in Canvas). But grading, which is more holistically known as assessment, is much more than a final score. Grading Assignments in Canvas Enter Score on Grades Page. If students aren't submitting anything, like for an in-class activity or participation points, you will need to create a "no submission" assignment on the Assignments page. Then, you can go right to the Grades page and enter a grade for each student, just as you would in spreadsheet software. Get Started with Assignments Easily distribute, analyze, and grade student work with Assignments for your LMS. Assignments is an application for your learning management system (LMS). It helps educators save time grading and guides students to turn in their best work with originality reports — all through the collaborative power of Google Workspace for Education. Get ... Grade Calculator Our grade calculator will automatically calculate not only your current grade but the grade you need to achieve on your final exam to achieve the overall course grade you desire. In addition, both the minimum and maximum course overall grades will be provided. Once you have entered the information required, the system will generate both a table ... TimelyGrader: Your AI-Powered Grading and Feedback Assistant Grade faster and more objectively. TimelyGrader helps instructors cut down on the time they spend grading while ensuring that grading decisions are consistent and objective. Turn 5 hours of grading time into 2 hours. Establish a benchmark for grading decisions. "The grading was eased and helped my life be a little bit more balanced.". Grade Calculator To calculate your average grade, follow these steps: Multiple each grade by its weight. In this example, you received a 90% on the first assignment and it was worth 10%. So multiply 90 x 10 = 900. You also received an 80% on the test and it was worth 20% of the class grade. So multiply 80 x 20 = 1600. Grade Calculator Use this simple EZ Grading calculator to find quiz, test and assignment scores: Easy Grader. Average Grade Calculator. Final Grade Calculator. # of questions: # wrong: Result. 10 / 10 = 100%. Show Grading Chart Show Decimals. How to Convert (Calculate) Your GPA to a 4.0 Scale To calculate your high school GPA, add together your grades on the 4.0 scale after converting them from letter grades, and divide the sum by the number of classes you are taking. Additionally, many high schools use a secondary GPA system called a "weighted GPA system." The weighted GPA system adds extra weight to courses at the Honors, AP, and ... Classroom Management Tools & Resources Educators can customize grading periods (e.g., quarters, semesters, terms) and grading scales (e.g., letter, numeric) in their class settings to align to their school's grading structure or system, reduce errors for SIS grade export and allow educators to more easily filter and analyze assignments. AI for Teachers: 33 Tools To Make Your Life Easier in 2024 This awesome AI platform provides real-time grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style suggestions for any written content. You can leverage Grammarly to streamline essay grading or to facilitate independent or peer-review practices for written assignments. (Free basic plan, premium starts at $12/month.) Engage your Musical Journey: Assignment 1 Grading Rubric Assignment 1 Grading Rubric (Due May 13) MUZA99H3 F (Listening to Music) University of Toronto Scarborough Department of Arts, Culture and Media Summer 2024 Weighting This assignment is worth 10 points (i.e., 10% of your final grade). Assignment Description This assignment is designed to engage your personal listening history through reflection on musical experiences and preferences. Let's Do assignment on Instagram: ""Struggling with assignments? Get Get expert help and ace your grades effortlessly!" Contact us on WhatsApp for reliable and high-quality...". Let's Do assignment | "Struggling with assignments? assignment essay homework paper phd report resume speech thesis