Grading Turnaround

[Caracal]

Finals end Friday.
Commencement on Saturday
Final grades due on Monday.

Seriously.

Usually about four days for us. I'm sure there are reasons for it, but I do find it annoying that the final grades are always due Monday at noon. Not really ideal.

[arcturus]

Our grades are due 72 hours after the scheduled final exam. My understanding is that this is designed to spread out the data entry so that not all grades are entered within the same 24 hours.

[mythbuster]

Finals end Thursday, Commencement on Friday, Grades due the following Tuesday at 10am.

At my Alma mater, the unofficial rule was 48 hours from the exam. Commencement was a full week after finals because they actually handed you your real diploma. The week in between gave time to be sure of who had passed and to print those diplomas.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Final grades are due two or three days after the last day of exam week, so the turnaround for any given faculty member depends on when your exams are scheduled: It can be tight if you have an exam on Friday and grades are due Monday, but no big deal if the exam is on Tuesday or Wednesday (exam dates are set by the university).

[onehappyunicorn]

Final day of the semester is today, all grades are du by 12pm tomorrow. It's kind of insane but that's what we are required to do.

That said I start getting reports at 9am tomorrow and anyone who is missing grades gets notified. The report escalates each hour until the president's office is notified after 12pm. Our department's policy has been to require our faculty to have grades submitted by end of day today so that no one shows on the report tomorrow. We usually have at least one or two people who don't do it correctly so I have to call them and walk them through the process.

I do my best to protect faculty but once the report is at the president's office level it's out of my hands. We had a faculty member who did not complete their grades and attendance correctly who then went on vacation the day everything was due. He hopped on a plane early in the morning and didn't answer his phone until after 5pm that day, well past when I had a Dean in my office wanting to know what was going on. That faculty member was not invited back.

[Mercudenton]

So it seems our three days is not out there. But my broader question is...why?! When I taught overseas, the turnaround time was 2-3 weeks. This seems to me perfectly reasonable given the volume of work and the idea that you might actually need to give the work serious consideration. In all my schooling it took around 2 months to receive grades for exams back; at college about 1 month. I never thought this was unreasonable, but signaled to me there was a strong and serious process in evaluating the work.

Is there a reason admin push for such a short submission?  Is there a federal funding issue at stake?  I used to think it was so students could graduate, but our students graduate before grades are due (meaning someone could walk who actually has failed all the classes and so actually cannot graduate... indeed, just this weekend I watched someone walk this weekend who just failed my class).

I'm not against faculty reporting in a timely fashion, but it seems these short turnarounds basically deny any way of setting extensive or meaningful work.  It's also so out of keeping with the protocols of academia...who submits an article and hopes that the peer report will be back after the weekend? I'm curious as to why faculty tolerate this expectation..I mean I know there are all kinds of reasons we do what admin says (job insecurity, pick your battles etc), but there are also faculty who are secure enough to push back on unreasonable expectations...so I'm assuming lots of faculty don't feel this turnaround is unreasonable?

[AvidReader]

So it seems our three days is not out there. But my broader question is...why?! When I taught overseas, the turnaround time was 2-3 weeks. This seems to me perfectly reasonable given the volume of work and the idea that you might actually need to give the work serious consideration. In all my schooling it took around 2 months to receive grades for exams back; at college about 1 month. I never thought this was unreasonable, but signaled to me there was a strong and serious process in evaluating the work.

I don't know your field, but when I taught overseas, the final work was usually a substantial percentage of the final grade (40-100% in several cases) and at some UK schools was also evaluated by an outside examiner, which added weeks to months to the timeline. Also, at most of those schools, there was a large gap between semesters.

In the US, my final exams and projects tend to be a smaller percentage of the final grade (10-20%), and the next semester sometimes starts only a few days after grades are due. Many of my classes are prerequisites for other classes, so knowing whether a student has passed affects the classes in which the student can enroll.

AR.

[Caracal]

So it seems our three days is not out there. But my broader question is...why?! When I taught overseas, the turnaround time was 2-3 weeks. This seems to me perfectly reasonable given the volume of work and the idea that you might actually need to give the work serious consideration. In all my schooling it took around 2 months to receive grades for exams back; at college about 1 month. I never thought this was unreasonable, but signaled to me there was a strong and serious process in evaluating the work.

Is there a reason admin push for such a short submission?  Is there a federal funding issue at stake?  I used to think it was so students could graduate, but our students graduate before grades are due (meaning someone could walk who actually has failed all the classes and so actually cannot graduate... indeed, just this weekend I watched someone walk this weekend who just failed my class).

I'm not against faculty reporting in a timely fashion, but it seems these short turnarounds basically deny any way of setting extensive or meaningful work.  It's also so out of keeping with the protocols of academia...who submits an article and hopes that the peer report will be back after the weekend? I'm curious as to why faculty tolerate this expectation..I mean I know there are all kinds of reasons we do what admin says (job insecurity, pick your battles etc), but there are also faculty who are secure enough to push back on unreasonable expectations...so I'm assuming lots of faculty don't feel this turnaround is unreasonable?

Yeah, its about financial aid and scholarships. I've taught before at a small liberal arts school where grades weren't due for almost a month. I assume that's because when you have small numbers of students and fewer people with financial aid dependent on grades you can manage any issues, but if there are tons of students in that position, delaying grades would cause too many problems.

That said, it always seems like you could make things a bit better on the margins. . Monday at noon always annoys me, couldn't it be Tuesday at noon and give everyone a full weekday to finish stuff up? At my school, it isn't about graduation since that happens before grades are due.

[Golazo]

Our grades are due at noon on Monday--last finals are Thursday except for makeups or unusual timings. To reduce the grading load, I usually do oral exams for my upper level classes--though that may be a outlay of 7 or 8 hours for the exams, I would use 2 of them proctoring an essay exam and I can have grading done for them on the spot, so it ends up being a clear savings of time if I have less than 20 students. For the lower division classes, I also give students with an A in all other requirements an exemption from the final.

Since our graduation is the following Saturday, I actually think we could have an extra day. The logic with our timing is that grades for graduating seniors need to be finished before graduation.

[the_geneticist]

The last final exam is Friday evenings & grades are due by the following Monday.  Most folks here give exams that can be automatically graded anyway.  Woe to the person who doesn't reserve a time to use the scanner machine.

Previous place, we had to finish grading ALL exams for seniors who would/might/tiniest snowballs chance of graduating.  Why?  Because they wanted to give students their actual diploma on graduation day.  I was told to grade the exams for all seniors first and to "grade until it mattered" - if they need X points to get an A, stop after X points.  If your class had a final exam late in finals week, it was really rough.

[kiana]

Previous place, we had to finish grading ALL exams for seniors who would/might/tiniest snowballs chance of graduating.  Why?  Because they wanted to give students their actual diploma on graduation day.  I was told to grade the exams for all seniors first and to "grade until it mattered" - if they need X points to get an A, stop after X points.  If your class had a final exam late in finals week, it was really rough.

That's pretty much what I do anyway.

We don't have +/-, so I go through and mark everything "right" "almost right" "more right than wrong" and "wtf", and then assign points as "full points", "full points -1", "half points", "0". Then I see how they scored.

If they end up with a 75% on that grading system and they needed 90% for an A and 60% for a B, I'm very confident in assigning that B.

[FishProf]

Finals end Friday.
Commencement on Saturday
Final grades due on Monday.

Seriously.

Finals End Friday.  Of this week.
Commencement is THURSDAY Friday and Saturday.  Of this week.
Grades are Due Monday. which is when summer session starts.
SRSLY

[Anon1787]

We have 4 business days after the last final exam. The university claims that it's necessary for graduation, graduate school applications, and financial aid.

[AvidReader]

I was told to grade the exams for all seniors first and to "grade until it mattered" - if they need X points to get an A, stop after X points.  If your class had a final exam late in finals week, it was really rough.

More than half the students who took or are taking my final exams today cannot pass my class. One has submitted no other work this semester. Unfortunately, because of the way we track student progress, I am required to mark rubrics for these students so the department can see how their skills have developed (or not) over the semester.

One student last semester submitted a single sentence for the essay exam final. I don't see how grading one sentence according to the essay rubric will possibly benefit my department, but that's just me.

AR.

[traductio]

So it seems our three days is not out there. But my broader question is...why?! When I taught overseas, the turnaround time was 2-3 weeks. This seems to me perfectly reasonable given the volume of work and the idea that you might actually need to give the work serious consideration. In all my schooling it took around 2 months to receive grades for exams back; at college about 1 month. I never thought this was unreasonable, but signaled to me there was a strong and serious process in evaluating the work.

I think part of it might relate to when degrees are awarded. I teach in Canada, where convocation (what we called commencement in the States) takes place in June for the semester that ends in early April. Hence the ten working days we get to grade things. Plus, my school is huge (as was the one I attended in Canada) -- I doubt the registrar could finalize the paperwork (of which we have so much more) in such a short turn around time.

Smaller Canadian schools might be different, but my only experience is at places with 40k+ students.