7 Dirty Secrets of Grading
It’s no secret grading isn’t fun.
Teachers of all stripes say one of the most stressful, even maddening, parts of their job is assessing their students’ work, especially if they want to do so fairly and accurately. It’s just plain hard to be equitable in what’s often a long, tedious chore.
There’s a reason, after all, students joke that graders throw their papers on the floor, and whichever ones land on top earn the “A.”
Below are seven real, dirty truths about grading.
1. It’s tiring drudgery.
Grading with a red pen is tiring on the hands, and writing the same feedback over and over can be tiring on the soul.
As John Tierney, a former professor of government at Boston College, eloquently explains, “When you’re two-thirds of the way through 35 essays on why the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland is important for an understanding of the development of American federalism, it takes a strong spirit not to want to poke your eyes out with a steak knife rather than read one more.”
2. It’s not reliable.
Rubric-based grading can increase reliability over single score grading.
Even so, halfway through the process, graders often realize their rubric needs a serious change. Instead of starting over, a grader will often plow through to the last exam using a poor metric. Those with the fortitude to adjust scores on each previously marked assignment can lose considerable time.
Furthermore, even careful math instructors can make mistakes adding up scores or recording them in their school’s gradebook.
3. It’s inconvenient.
Grading handcuffs graders to The Pile.
For large courses with multiple graders, scheduling “grading parties” can be a huge burden. At the grading party, The Pile patiently sits on a table surrounded by pizza and hungry graders. Once the pizza is gone, graders start exhaustively working through The Pile, but invariably it’s The Pile that will exhaust them.
4. It’s dirty.
Instructors and TA’s push through grading between meetings, meals, and more, which means lots of coffee and wine splatters, oily fingerprints, and crumpled papers.
It also means a lot of germs! A study by the Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine showed that bacterial pathogens (E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, etc.) can survive on paper for up to 72 hours. Furthermore, the flu virus can survive up to 12 hours on paper. You better hope either no one at your grading party — or everyone — is sick.
5. It’s not always consistent.
The method of grading one student’s entire assignment, then the next one, is prone to discrepancies between students’ answers as graders lose focus.
Forgetfulness of an individual grader or poor communication among teaching assistants can cause some students to lose more points on question for the same mistake.
6. It can be influenced by favoritism and mood of the grader.
The UK Department for Education found teachers allow personal feelings to influence their grading in at least 15 percent of cases, according to its study of more than 2,000 instructors over the course of a year.
Many graders try to avoid bias by not looking at which answers belong to which students, but that’s logistically hard, especially when papers are stapled together.
Another harsh reality about grading is that it can be susceptible to mood— say after grading 200 exams when fatigue and irritability set in.
7. It’s easy to lose.
Keys and phones don’t take much to misplace.
Hundreds of sheets of graded papers can be just as easy to lose (but with far worse consequences!).
At Gradescope, a web app for grading paper-based assignments, we’re tackling these seven issues head on. Learn more about Gradescope and how it helps make the lives of graders easier and ensure fairness.
Because your cat certainly won’t help you.
