Grading Practices

[HigherEd7]

How stringent should you be in your grading of assignments? Should you look for every detail in a response to a discussion post and should you check for plagiarism on every assignment that is turned in.

If you are lenient grader students can't wait to take your course and give you perfect scores on your student evaluation and if you are strict, well you get low scores on your evaluation or they file a grade appeal and most of the time get their grade changed.

It seems like higher education has turned more into a business model vs a place for a student to get an education and if you flunk a student for not meeting the expectations in your course it is frowned upon because the more students pass the more money the university makes.

[Caracal]

How stringent should you be in your grading of assignments? Should you look for every detail in a response to a discussion post and should you check for plagiarism on every assignment that is turned in.

If you are lenient grader students can't wait to take your course and give you perfect scores on your student evaluation and if you are strict, well you get low scores on your evaluation or they file a grade appeal and most of the time get their grade changed.

It seems like higher education has turned more into a business model vs a place for a student to get an education and if you flunk a student for not meeting the expectations in your course it is frowned upon because the more students pass the more money the university makes.

I've now been teaching for over a decade, have probably taught 1500 students or so and have yet to have a grade appeal...

[polly_mer]

How's that job search going, HigherEd7?

Remember it's better to be on a career ladder that leads to somewhere good in mid-career than to be playing the hope-the-doors-stay-open-while-providing-a-known-shoddy-product game.  Depending on what round your employer is playing, you may not have long before you are forced to find another job on short notice.

If you are being paid to help struggling students learn with acknowledgment for the struggle, then that's a good position and it's your attitude that must change.

If you are told to lower reasonable standards down to the level that sufficient students stay enrolled, then you need to find another job before you are non-renewed/fired/retrenched.

[Parasaurolophus]

Being too detail-oriented is not a constructive use of my time. And it has no effect on most students.

When my plagiarism detector goes off, I spend some time looking. Otherwise, I don't.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I make expectations clear for students and I grade them accordingly. If students don't do what I ask, then they are penalized. I also don't round up, give extra credit, or give in to grade grubbers. I get good evals and, as far as I know, have never had a formal grade complaint filed against me.

I also take this approach:

Being too detail-oriented is not a constructive use of my time. And it has no effect on most students.

When my plagiarism detector goes off, I spend some time looking. Otherwise, I don't.

[downer]

I've stopped looking at my student evaluations. I guess if anything important turns up in them, the chairs will let me know. Nothing so far.

I do occasionally make my own surveys of students when there is particular feedback I want. That can be useful.

Quite often at the CC, I fail about 1/3 of the class for one class and give a handful of A grades. For another I give about 70-80% A grades. Those are the grades the students earn. No complaints from students in either class. And I keep getting employed.

[Caracal]

Being too detail-oriented is not a constructive use of my time. And it has no effect on most students.

When my plagiarism detector goes off, I spend some time looking. Otherwise, I don't.

Yeah, and when that search doesn't turn up anything, I just move on, especially if the language is the kind of thing that fits with a student trying a bit too hard to adopt a weird voice. Do I miss plagiarized papers sometimes? Probably, but  I can live with that. I try to craft assignments in a way that limits the benefits of plagiarism, so those students are probably not getting As. I'm supposed to be teaching students, not being the plagiarism police.

[fishbrains]

If you are lenient grader students can't wait to take your course and give you perfect scores on your student evaluation and if you are strict, well you get low scores on your evaluation or they file a grade appeal and most of the time get their grade changed.

Every place is different, but this hasn't been my experience at my CC--at least in the long-term. Word gets around about faculty--especially adjuncts--who don't do their jobs and then send the incompetent students they just passed-no-matter-what on to the next course in the sequence. Good students don't appreciate everyone getting a good grade in a course regardless of effort, and they are pretty vocal about it. Good faculty don't appreciate it much either. References get hard to come by.

During my last search committee work, we quickly passed on a few adjuncts who had decent evals, but whose refugees consistently struggled mightily in later courses. Plus students often comment in the evals about how easy the course was, which can receive some unwanted attention from the committee.

I've now been teaching for over a decade, have probably taught 1500 students or so and have yet to have a grade appeal...

I have had a few grade appeals in over twenty years, but none were even remotely close to being successful for the students. Most were motivated by angry parents whose kids had been lying to them. Go figure.

[polly_mer]

Even with grade appeals, students don't win if they have no case.  They can't win on "the professor had clear standards and I didn't meet them".  I think I had grade appeals every semester because I "crushed dreams of becoming a doctor or teacher" as part of insisting that science classes with math requirements would indeed have math problems on every assignment with multiple assignments per week.

I remember a particular incident that resulted in the associate dean commending me on my patience with the student because the AD was out of patience after one ten-minute meeting and the course met for six hours per week for a sixteen-week term.

Even if literally the whole class complains to the chair, you still have to be drastically wrong to be fired.  It was not a fun semester to realize zero of the students had the prerequisites necessary for a required course (came out during the meeting with the chair because literally the whole class complained in week three) that had no wiggle room in either content or graduation requirements.

[the_geneticist]

How stringent should you be in your grading of assignments? Should you look for every detail in a response to a discussion post and should you check for plagiarism on every assignment that is turned in.

If you are lenient grader students can't wait to take your course and give you perfect scores on your student evaluation and if you are strict, well you get low scores on your evaluation or they file a grade appeal and most of the time get their grade changed.

It seems like higher education has turned more into a business model vs a place for a student to get an education and if you flunk a student for not meeting the expectations in your course it is frowned upon because the more students pass the more money the university makes.

Look, you don't have the time to agonize over every discussion post.  Make it simple: post = full points vs no post = no points.  Or if you want to make it slightly complex: post that addresses the topic = full points, posted anything = 1/2 points, no post = no points.

As for the looking for cheating, you can design your assessments to make it much HARDER to cheat by doing things like:
1) have students submit proposals/outlines before the final submission
2) insist that they include data/examples from what you've discussed/measured/observed
3) give a rubric to the students
4) make the assignment different every term (e.g. different examples, collect new data, swap out a poem/reading, etc.)

I can guarantee that a purchased or free internet answer is going to be a poor match to the expectations & will fail on those grounds.
You can also use "TurnItIn" or other software that will check their responses against each other and the internet.
Look, I'd rather use my brain space to create better instructional activities than to fret about possible cheating. 

Finally, there is a LOT of ground between "strict/you all fail" and "lenient/everyone gets an A".  Try for "clear standards & stick to them". 

[marshwiggle]

Look, you don't have the time to agonize over every discussion post.  Make it simple: post = full points vs no post = no points. Or if you want to make it slightly complex: post that addresses the topic = full points, posted anything = 1/2 points, no post = no points.

This is the way to grade all kinds of things, including individual elements of a multi-part rubric or checklist; the final grade will be reflective of the number of elements reasonably addressed.

Finally, there is a LOT of ground between "strict/you all fail" and "lenient/everyone gets an A".  Try for "clear standards & stick to them".

Absolutely. And as noted above, there will be so many components of requirements that even if each component is very easily evaluated, the final grades will vary according to how many components are completed, giving a non-binary distribution.

[Descartes]

Over here at "we are barely hanging on and are the higher ed joke of the metro area SLAC," the pressure is on to give all A's.

Plagiarism?  Oh, God, who even cares?  If I actually looked for it, found it, and acted on it I'm pretty sure the response would be anger - towards me - for going out of my way to look for something to ding students on.

Students just don't ever show up, don't turn things in, and come and score a 24% on the final?  That's a solid D and a pass - oh, and it's probably my fault they scored so low because I didn't put on a clown show for them and play games in class like the ones we used to play in elementary school to help them learn the material.

Not that I'm bitter or irritated or anything.

[downer]

Over here at "we are barely hanging on and are the higher ed joke of the metro area SLAC," the pressure is on to give all A's.

Plagiarism?  Oh, God, who even cares?  If I actually looked for it, found it, and acted on it I'm pretty sure the response would be anger - towards me - for going out of my way to look for something to ding students on.

Students just don't ever show up, don't turn things in, and come and score a 24% on the final?  That's a solid D and a pass - oh, and it's probably my fault they scored so low because I didn't put on a clown show for them and play games in class like the ones we used to play in elementary school to help them learn the material.

Not that I'm bitter or irritated or anything.

Giving up on caring is a good coping policy in the short term. Put all your energy into getting the next job!

[Golazo]

My place sure isn't perfect but I appreciate that I have a reputation as a pretty brutal grader (particularly for upper level courses) and I've received good evals and little complaining. 

[Mobius]

How stringent should you be in your grading of assignments? Should you look for every detail in a response to a discussion post and should you check for plagiarism on every assignment that is turned in.

If you are lenient grader students can't wait to take your course and give you perfect scores on your student evaluation and if you are strict, well you get low scores on your evaluation or they file a grade appeal and most of the time get their grade changed.

It seems like higher education has turned more into a business model vs a place for a student to get an education and if you flunk a student for not meeting the expectations in your course it is frowned upon because the more students pass the more money the university makes.

I don't scour discussion posts. I use a rubric and vast majority students don't complain to me (and % that have complained to chair or above has been minuscule). My place discounts student evals, as well. I know that doesn't happen everywhere. Instead, admin and chairs are looking for issues like not being consistent, temperament, appropriate assessments for the course, etc. I used to worry I'm too hard or lenient, but that went away after a few years.