essay about grading

Center for Teaching

Grading student work.

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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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The Evidence-Backed Grader

Help students focus on learning—not the grade—with these research-based tips.

Let us set the scene: A group of teachers sit at a broad conference table, reading student essays together. One scans an essay and gives it a C, noting its lack of coherence. Another pushes the same essay back and pronounces it a B minus, pointing out that the author used quotes well and included insightful analysis.

Sound familiar? For English teacher Seth Czarnecki, this was a quadrennial ritual at his Massachusetts high school. “Though the process varies from time to time, the results are the same. Some of us obsess over pluses and minuses. Others plumb the sample for deficiencies. Ultimately, we leave the exercise in disagreement about the grade the essay deserves,” Czarnecki wrote in English Journal earlier this year.

If grading were merely imprecise but still highly motivating for students, it might justify placing an even greater emphasis on traditional assessment practices. But that’s not the case, says Chris Hulleman, a professor and researcher at the University of Virginia, and an expert in student motivation. “Despite the conventional wisdom in education, grades don’t motivate students to do their best work, nor do they lead to better learning or performance,” he wrote in an Edutopia article coauthored by science teacher Ian Kelleher.

This isn’t about throwing grades out entirely. Some method for measuring student knowledge at regular intervals—using standards-based grading, portfolios, or student conferences, for example—is needed to provide stakeholders with a window into academic progress. And there are forms of grading, such as multiple-choice tests and single-answer mathematical exams, that are more precise than the example Czarnecki provides. In the end, solutions to the problem of grading do not need to be absolute. Teachers can still rely on periodic summative assessments and consider evidence-backed ways to reduce the demotivating impact of grading, create more precise measures, and prioritize the messy process of learning over the largely artificial cleanness of grading.

MIND YOUR ZEROS

A through F letter grades and the 100-point scale feel like eternal verities—systems handed down from the heavens, fully formed. In reality, the 100-point grading scale made its U.S. debut nearly two centuries ago and was originally centered around the 50-point mark, with scores rarely reaching the upper and lower extremes, according to a 2013 study . For your grandparents’ grandparents, then, a score of 0 for missed work would be a setback, but not an insurmountable one. Today’s version of the 100-point grading scale, however—after shifting upward to align with the A through F grading scale—is a “badly lopsided scale that is heavily gamed against the student,” the researchers concluded. Factor a single zero into a relatively strong quarter of learning, and a previously A student may never fully recover.

Handing out stiff sentences for missing work, some educators argue, sensibly, teaches students important lessons about accountability and prepares them for real-world consequences. But a survey from 2022 reveals that extensions are frequently granted in professional settings, and in a 2012 study , researchers discovered that when the minimum mark in school was a 50 instead of a zero, students put more effort into their learning, earned higher test scores, and graduated at higher rates than their peers under traditional grading schemes. Severe grading practices, the researchers explained, can trigger “defensive and self-destructive responses in students” that can hamper motivation and draw out disruptive behavior.

It might still make sense to give zeros under some circumstances. But the research suggests that it’s better to look for opportunities to give students a path forward. Simple mathematical adjustments, such as dropping the lowest grade (or both the lowest and highest grades) can remove anomalous scores, improve student motivation, and provide a more accurate picture of a student’s ability.

HOLD YOUR CARDS

You can maintain report cards and some, or even most, of your grading practices but find innovative ways to prioritize process over product. In a 2021 study , researchers proposed a simple tweak to the grading sequence. Undergraduate students were randomly assigned to first receive either grades or written feedback on their lab assignments. Those who saw their feedback before the grade became more proficient learners, outperforming their peers by a full two-thirds of a letter grade on future assignments. “Prioritizing written teacher comments can support students to understand their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to allocate effort to aspects that need improvement. This important process can be undermined by seeing a grade,” the study authors concluded.

To cultivate an atmosphere that encourages creativity and curiosity, teachers at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, make it a point to delay grades until the end of the unit—a mistake-friendly strategy that motivates students to be creative and take intellectual risks. Emphasizing grades too early in the learning process can derail students, explains English language learners teacher Kirsten McWilliams, but delaying grades “is a great way to just give them fluency and comfort with the writing process.”

GO LOW-STAKES, FREQUENTLY

Quizzes, often thought of as a quick way to measure knowledge, are surprisingly flexible tools. A deep body of research reveals that they improve learning, too—an unexpected benefit often referred to as the testing effect .

Repeated quizzing tends to work wonders. A 2013 study , for example, demonstrated that quizzing students frequently while providing corrective feedback significantly improved learning outcomes—an effect that was still detectable five weeks later. There’s no need to invest a ton of teacher time, either, since even simple quizzing formats seem to do the job. A study from 2014 looked at the impact of short-answer and multiple-choice quizzes on middle school students and concluded that “frequent classroom quizzing with feedback” dramatically outperformed rereading and restudying on learning outcomes—and that “multiple-choice quizzing [was] as effective as short-answer quizzing for this purpose.”

Lowering the stakes also means lowering blood pressure: A 2014 study demonstrated that breaking bigger tests into smaller retrieval sessions reduced final test anxiety for 72 percent of middle and high school students. To change students’ mindsets around testing, consider calling your low-stakes sessions “practice” rather than “quizzes,” and use digital tools like Kahoot or Quizizz to speed up the process, allowing you to see the results in real time and even to gamify your quizzing.

PEER GRADING (WITH TRAINING WHEELS)

Fair, reliable assessment instruments are hard to design and can be difficult to respond to quickly and meaningfully. In many cases, according to former high school mathematics teacher Kareem Farah, now the founder of the Modern Classroom Project, assessment becomes the cart that drives the horse —teachers know that practice makes perfect but assign less work because they feel incapable of grading the products.

Recent research suggests that there are real alternatives, if you plan accordingly. In a 2022 meta-analysis , for example, researchers looked at 175 studies on self-assessment and peer assessment and found that asking students to take active roles in feedback and evaluation “led to significantly better academic performance” across all age groups.

But teachers can’t just ask students to grade and expect big results, the researchers caution. Spend time modeling productive feedback, and provide rubrics, checklists, or exemplars to ensure that students give helpful, learning-oriented feedback. Research from 2023 confirms the finding, revealing that high school students improved their writing by a half-letter grade when they revised while referring to mentor texts or rubrics that laid out expectations, such as narrative cohesiveness or the importance of making a central claim.

LEAN ON RUBRICS

Even with the best intentions, grading can be biased, subtly injecting variability and unpredictability into students’ scores. Research, for example, shows that teachers unwittingly award higher grades to essays with good handwriting , are more lenient toward boys when they submit partial math solutions , and associate being overweight with laziness and low academic potential . Rubrics can help a great deal, research suggests, by providing a structured way to grade subjective work products, reducing the factors contributing to the grade, and explicitly guiding student efforts.

In a 2020 study , David Quinn, an assistant professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, asked teachers to grade personal essays written by a fictional second-grade student. Two versions of the essay were produced, with one subtle difference: The name of a sibling referenced in the essays was either “Dashawn” or “Connor,” signaling a possible racial difference. Despite being virtually identical, the essays including the name Dashawn were 4.7 percentage points less likely to meet grade-level standards than their Connor counterparts.

Bias seeps in where standards are lacking: “If teachers are evaluating student work and they are unsure what standard to compare the work to, implicit stereotypes can ‘fill in the blanks,’” Quinn explained in the study. When teachers used a grading rubric, on the other hand—one that guided teachers to look for specific elements such as being able to recount an event with details—the grading bias was nearly eliminated, he discovered.

To improve your grading, you can use rubrics that identify clear standards and invite other teachers to audit your assessment policies and materials, said Quinn. High school teacher Danah Hashem uses the single-point rubric —which focuses on a single element, such as “Uses clear examples to support the argument”—to simplify the activity, reduce noise in the feedback, and shift student attention toward a single area of improvement. Teacher Jacqueline Harmer uses rubrics to help her students build metacognitive strategies , reflecting on what they know while planning for their future learning.

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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.

Recommended Readings

The Ultimate Guide to Metacognition for Post-Secondary Courses

25 Effective Instructional Strategies For Educators

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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 .

What Is an Essay Grading Rubric & 11 Tools to Streamline Your Grading

Mastering essay writing is a crucial skill, and grading these essays can be challenging for teachers. That's where essay grading rubrics come into play. These tools for teachers provide a clear framework for assessing student work, making the process more efficient and fair. This blog explores the ins and outs of essay grading rubrics, how they benefit both teachers and students, and how they improve the overall learning process. Dive into this essential aspect of learning assessment if you're looking to streamline your grading process and provide valuable feedback to your students.

What Is an Essay Grading Rubric?

In simple terms, an Essay Grading Rubric is an assessment tool used by educators to evaluate and grade students' essays. A rubric breaks down the essay into various components or criteria that the student needs to fulfill to achieve a certain score. These criteria usually cover aspects like organization, content, language use, and mechanics. The rubric typically includes four performance levels - excellent, good, fair, and poor - to categorize the quality of the student's work. Each performance level comes with a set of descriptors that clearly define what is expected at that level. 

Components of an Essay Grading Rubric

1. criteria.

The criteria in an essay grading rubric outline the specific areas that a student's essay will be assessed on. These criteria vary depending on the teacher's goals for the assignment. They may include elements like thesis statement, organization, supporting evidence, analysis, language use, and mechanics. Each criterion is usually given a numerical value that corresponds to a specific performance level.

2. Performance Levels

Performance levels, or grading scales , provide a framework for evaluating student work in a rubric. These levels are often labeled with phrases like "excellent," "good," "fair," and "poor." By associating these levels with numerical scores, educators can assign a grade to a student's essay based on where their performance falls on the scale.

3. Descriptors

Descriptors are the detailed explanations that accompany each performance level. They give students a clear understanding of what is expected at each level of performance. For example, a rubric might state that an "excellent" analysis has a clear and insightful interpretation of the text, while a "fair" analysis may lack depth or be unclear. Essay grading rubrics help teachers evaluate student work objectively and transparently. They break down the grading process into manageable components and provide students with clear expectations for their assignments.

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Types of Essay Grading Rubrics

An analytic rubric breaks down all the components of a project, presentation, or essay into different criteria. Each criterion is scored individually, which can be helpful for providing detailed feedback on specific areas of strength or weakness. While it may be more time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric, an analytic rubric allows for each criterion to be weighted to reflect its relative importance. It may require more work for instructors to write feedback for each criterion, but it can help provide students with specific areas for improvement.  On the other hand, a holistic rubric includes all the criteria 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. Holistic rubrics may save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student, but they provide less specific feedback than analytic rubrics.

General vs. Task-Specific Essay Grading Rubric

The use of general versus task-specific rubrics depends on the learning objectives and the assessment task. General rubrics are typically used for broad assessments where the criteria can be applied to a wide variety of tasks. In contrast, task-specific rubrics are tailored to the requirements of a particular performance task or an outcome. General rubrics can be used efficiently across a wide range of assignments, providing consistency in evaluation.  They can serve as a guide for what is expected of students without overwhelming them with overly specific criteria. On the other hand, task-specific rubrics are designed to assess a particular task or performance outcome, providing detailed guidelines and expectations for the students. Task-specific rubrics can provide targeted feedback that helps students understand their strengths and areas for improvement in relation to a specific task or learning objective.

6 Benefits of Using an Essay Grading Rubric

Rubrics are essential tools for grading essays. They bring a level of objectivity and fairness that is hard to achieve with other grading methods. Rubrics serve as a guide for what teachers are looking for in the student’s work. This eliminates potential bias from teachers, creating a standard that every student’s work is measured against.  The rubric can also help teachers move quicker through grading essays as they can simply refer to the guide when grading and awarding points. Rubrics can provide a level of transparency for students. This means they understand why they received the grade they did and what could have been done better. In the end, rubrics can save time and ensure more accurate grading for teachers while providing a clear roadmap for students to follow to help them achieve a better grade. 

1. Students know what is expected.

Rubrics outline what students are expected to learn from a particular assignment. They highlight the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should gain from their work. This means that students know what they need to do to get the grade they desire. They can check off each item as they demonstrate their understanding of the concepts across the rubric.

2. Students see that learning is about gaining specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes

Rubrics can be an essential tool in helping students to understand concepts. Instead of seeing the grade as an endpoint, rubrics can be an opportunity for students to see what they have learned and accomplished. This can be a motivating factor for students to do better in school.

3. Students may self-assess to reflect on their learning

Rubrics can be an essential tool for students , not just teachers. Students can use the rubric to assess themselves and get an idea of what they need to work on. This can help students work on the areas where they need improvement and can be a powerful tool for self-improvement.

4. Teachers and students are clear on what is being assessed

Rubrics are an essential tool for teachers as well. Teachers can use the rubric to let students know what is expected of them. Rubrics make it clear what the teacher is looking for in the student’s work, making it easier for teachers to assess work. 

5. Teachers may consistently assess student work without having to re-write similar comments

Rubrics make it easier for teachers to assess student work. Instead of having to write the same comments over and over, teachers can use the rubric to quickly assess students’ work. This can save teachers time and frustration and make it easier to provide feedback to students.

6. Teachers with high marking loads save considerable time

Rubrics can be a powerful tool for saving teachers time. Instead of having to spend hours grading individual assignments, teachers can use the rubric to quickly assess student work. This can save teachers hours of work and frustration and can make it easier for teachers to assess student work.

Essay Grading Efficiency with EssayGrader's AI Platform

EssayGrader is the most accurate AI grading platform trusted by 30,000+ educators worldwide. On average it takes a teacher 10 minutes to grade a single essay, with EssayGrader that time is cut down to 30 seconds That's a 95% reduction in the time it takes to grade an essay, with the same results.  With EssayGrader, Teachers can:

• Replicate their grading rubrics (so AI doesn't have to do the guesswork to set the grading criteria)
• Setup fully custom rubrics
• Grade essays by class
• Bulk upload of essays
• Use our AI detector to catch essays written by AI
• Summarize essays with our Essay summarizer 

Primary school, high school, and even college professors grade their students' essays with the help of our AI tool. Over half a million essays were graded by 30,000+ teachers on our platform. Save 95% of your time for grading school work with our tool to get high-quality, specific and accurate writing feedback for essays in seconds.  ‍ Get started for free today!

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How to Design a Grading Rubric

1. Analyze the assignment

When creating a rubric from scratch, the first step is to thoroughly analyze the assignment you are grading. What are the main objectives of the assignment? What do you want your students to demonstrate through their work? Are there different smaller tasks within the assignment that need to be evaluated separately? By considering these questions, you can better determine the criteria and performance levels to include in your rubric.

2. Decide what kind of rubric you will use

There are various types of rubrics to choose from, including holistic, analytic/descriptive, and single-point rubrics. Deciding which type best suits your assessment will help you structure your grading criteria effectively. Holistic rubrics assess overall performance, analytic/descriptive rubrics break down performance into specific criteria, and single-point rubrics focus on proficiency levels.

3. Look for templates and examples 

Before creating your rubric from scratch, it can be helpful to look for templates or examples online. These resources can give you a starting point and help you align your rubric with the assignment's expectations and learning objectives. Collaborating with colleagues or asking students for input can also provide valuable insights.

4. Define the assignment criteria

Next, define the specific criteria you will use to evaluate the assignment. These criteria should align with the learning objectives and expectations of the assignment. Collaborating with colleagues, teaching assistants, and students can help you brainstorm effective grading criteria and ensure they are precise and unambiguous.

5. Design the rating scale

Consider the number of levels you want to include in your rating scale and whether you will use numbers or descriptive labels. The rating scale should provide a clear assessment of student performance and align with the assignment requirements. Ensure the rubric is organized logically and comprehensible to students.

6. Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

For each level of the rating scale, provide clear descriptions of what constitutes performance at that level. These descriptions should be observable and measurable, using parallel language across the scale. Consider what distinguishes each level of performance and how it aligns with the assignment's expectations.

7. Create your rubric

Once you have established the criteria and rating scale, create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet format. Online tools can assist in creating a rubric, but you will likely need to transfer the details to your grading platform manually. Ensure the rubric is clear and accessible to students.

8. Pilot-test your rubric

Before using your rubric to grade actual student work, pilot-test it with colleagues, teaching assistants, and students. Collect feedback on the rubric's effectiveness and make necessary revisions based on the results. Piloting the rubric can help ensure it aligns with the assignment objectives and provides valuable feedback to students.

11 Best AI Essay Grading Rubrics Platforms

1. EssayGrader

EssayGrader is an exceptional tool that streamlines the grading process for educators. Through AI technology, this platform significantly reduces the time taken to grade essays while maintaining high accuracy. It allows teachers to replicate their grading rubrics and provides the flexibility of setting custom rubrics. Educators can:

• Upload essays in bulk
• Detect AI-written essays
• Summarize essays efficiently

With over half a million essays graded by 30,000+ teachers, EssayGrader is a reliable tool for grading essays across different educational levels.

2. Gradescope

Gradescope stands out as one of the best AI graders, offering a sophisticated platform for automated essay evaluation. It allows for quick and accurate grading , customizable rubrics, and insightful analytics to identify common misconceptions among students. This tool enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of the grading process.

3. Turnitin

Renowned for its plagiarism detection capabilities, Turnitin extends its functionality to include AI essay grading. By leveraging AI technology, Turnitin ensures academic integrity, enhances originality, and offers in-depth feedback on writing quality. This tool supports the automated grading of various writing formats, making the assessment process more efficient.

4. PaperRater

PaperRater utilizes AI for consistent and unbiased grading across various subjects. It provides immediate feedback essential for large-scale online courses and improves scalability. With this tool, educators can ensure fair and efficient grading processes.

5. AI For Teachers

Known for offering free AI graders and tools for teachers, AI For Teachers provides an opportunity to leverage AI technology effortlessly. It comes with personalized rubrics, easy-to-use AI graders, and reliable customer support. This tool enhances the grading experience for educators.

6. Canvas SpeedGrader

Integrated within the Canvas Learning Management System, SpeedGrader utilizes AI for efficient and seamless essay grading. It offers a streamlined workflow, multimedia feedback options, and collaborative grading among educators. This tool enhances the grading experience within the Canvas platform.

7. CoGrader

CoGrader simplifies grading by integrating seamlessly with Google Classroom for easy import and export of assignments. It provides instant feedback on assignments, automates grading, reduces time spent, and ensures fairness by removing biases. This tool enhances the efficiency and accuracy of the grading process.

8. AI For Teachers

For ChatGPT Plus users, AI For Teachers offers free access to exceptional value without additional cost. By integrating ChatGPT capabilities, educators can create interactive learning experiences and tailor AI bots for specific classroom needs. This tool enhances student engagement and learning outcomes.

Smodin offers AI-powered writing assistance tools for rewriting, plagiarism detection, summarizing, and AI writing. With multilingual support and integration with various useful tools, Smodin caters to students, teachers, and content creators. This tool enhances writing and grading processes across different languages.

10. GradeCam

GradeCam facilitates quick scanning and grading of paper tests, providing timely feedback crucial for students' learning adjustments. It offers analytics tools that give insights into student progress and areas for improvement, supporting data-driven instructional decisions. This tool enhances the grading process and student feedback.

11. SnapGrader

SnapGrader enables teachers to quickly digitize paper tests and quizzes, eliminating manual data entry. It provides instant feedback to students, offers insights into grading accuracy and consistency, and supports various question formats. With SnapGrader, educators can efficiently assess student performance and provide timely feedback to enhance learning.

How to Choose the Best Essay Grading Rubric

Adaptability

When choosing a rubric for grading essays, it's vital to consider its adaptability. You want a rubric that can easily cater to different types of assignments and essays. Flexibility is key, especially if you assess an array of genres or topics. Being able to customize the rubric to suit the specific needs of your students and course objectives is imperative .

Accuracy and Specificity

The rubric you choose must accurately assess the essays. It should provide specific feedback on grammar, coherence, clarity, and writing style errors. Detailed error reports should be generated, highlighting the mistakes made by students. This specific feedback is crucial as it allows you to provide targeted feedback to help students improve their writing skills.

Ease of Use

You need a rubric that is not only accurate but also user-friendly. The rubric should be intuitive and easy to navigate. A clutter-free interface ensures that grading is efficient and that you can focus on providing valuable feedback to your students.

Bulk Uploading

If you are handling numerous essays, consider a rubric that allows for bulk uploading. This feature streamlines the grading process by enabling you to evaluate an entire class's worth of essays at once. This can be a huge time-saver and helps maintain consistency in grading.

Improvement Suggestions

Look for a rubric that does not just identify errors but also offers suggestions for improvement. Constructive feedback is crucial in helping students enhance their writing skills. A rubric that not only points out mistakes but also provides insights on how to rectify those mistakes can be incredibly beneficial.

Alignment with Traditional Rubrics

If you have been using traditional rubrics, ensure that the AI rubric aligns with your existing grading practices. You should have the flexibility to create custom rubrics based on your preferred criteria. This ensures that the rubric meets the specific needs of your course and students.

Integration

Select AI grading tools that seamlessly integrate with existing Learning Management Systems. This integration fosters efficiency in your overall workflow and helps streamline the grading process. A rubric that easily integrates with your existing systems can save you time and effort in managing assignments and grading student work.

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Save Time While Grading Schoolwork — Join 30,000+ Educators Worldwide & Use EssayGrader AI, The Original AI Essay Grader

EssayGrader is an innovative AI grading platform designed to transform the way educators grade essays. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we help teachers save time and provide accurate and effective feedback to students. With the power of AI, EssayGrader offers several key features that make the grading process more efficient and precise.

Replication of Grading Rubrics

Our platform allows educators to replicate their grading rubrics, ensuring that AI accurately assesses essays based on the established criteria. This feature eliminates guesswork and guarantees consistent and fair grading for all students.

Custom Rubrics

EssayGrader enables teachers to create fully customized rubrics tailored to their specific requirements. This flexibility allows educators to adapt the grading criteria to the unique needs of their classes and assignments.

Bulk Upload and Class-based Grading

Teachers can streamline the grading process by uploading multiple essays in bulk and grading them by class. This functionality simplifies the workflow for educators who need to assess numerous essays efficiently.

AI Detector

EssayGrader includes an AI detector that can identify essays generated by AI programs. This feature helps maintain academic integrity by flagging essays that may not reflect authentic student work.

Essay Summarizer

Our platform offers an essay summarizer tool that condenses essays into concise summaries. This feature enables educators to quickly grasp the main points of an essay and provide targeted feedback to students. Educators around the world trust EssayGrader to enhance their grading processes and provide valuable feedback to students. By leveraging AI technology, our platform empowers teachers to save time, improve grading accuracy, and deliver high-quality feedback to support student learning and growth. Join the thousands of educators who have already embraced this innovative tool and experience the benefits of efficient and effective essay grading with EssayGrader .

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Princeton Writing Program

Grading Writing

Grades are seen by many students as random and subjective, a belief that rampant grade inflation at the college level has helped to reinforce. Yet grades have the potential to be among the most powerful of teaching tools. When standards are announced and consistently applied, grades provide a reasonably objective measure of achievement (and distance to improvement), signaling to students the extent to which they need to challenge familiar ways of thinking and writing. Grades also give written comments an edge they might not otherwise have.

Grading with clear criteria in mind helps to ensure fairness and objectivity. So does another principle of grading: Grade the paper and nothing but the paper — not the person who wrote it, the effort that went into it, or the improvement it shows. This principle dramatically simplifies the task of evaluation by eliminating second guessing; it also guarantees that students are judged on an equal basis. “Grade the paper and nothing but the paper” means grading the entire paper, not just a part of it. Papers bend and swoop and turn, and grades need to be responsive to their sometimes erratic flight patterns. It means grading the actual paper as well. Rather than assigning a grade based on what a paper seems at first glance to be, or what in hindsight it might have been, it’s more fair—and more objective—to grade the paper as it actually is.

You might also consider complementing letter grades for high-stakes assignments with contract grades for class participation or “spec” grades for low-stakes assignments, helping to incentivize students to meet critical benchmarks and to take intellectual risks during the writing process.

In the Spotlight: Writing Program Grading Standards for Revisions (used across all the Writing Seminars to grade the three major essays) 

Three Steps to Determine a Grade

If you wait to decide on the grade until after you’ve written your final comment, the grade you assign is likely to be more accurate and fair than would otherwise be true, and the decision-making process will be less agonizing. To determine the grade, try these three steps:

• Re-read your final comment. As you do this, think about the extent to which the paper has met your grading criteria. You might even compose, in your notes or in your mind, a brief description of the paper in terms of these criteria—for example, “Good research question, obvious enthusiasm for the topic, and clear writing, but driven by an observation, not a thesis; use of a listing structure; lack of evidence to ground generalizations; overreliance on the opinions of secondary sources.”
• Determine whether a paper falls above or below “the line.” It’s useful to think of papers as falling above or below an imaginary line in the grading scale—for example, B-/C+. A line set higher on the grading scale (say, at A-/B+) will result in higher grades. Whether a paper falls above or below the line most often depends on how effective the paper’s source use and thesis are: a readable paper with a clear argument grounded in specific sources will usually receive an above-the-line grade; a paper that’s difficult to read, stuck in generalities, and lacking clear argument will usually receive a below-the-line grade. The paper described above would most certainly fall below the line, no matter where the line is set.
• Make fine distinctions. Having determined whether a paper is above or be- low the line, consider why it should receive a particular grade, not something slightly higher or slightly lower. If the line is set at B-/C+, then the paper described above would probably earn a C, because its weaknesses make a C+ too generous, and its strengths in the making suggest a C- or lower would be too harsh. If the line is set at A-/B+, the paper would probably get a B. As you can infer, disagreements over grades are often actually disagreements over where the line is set.

Although grading a piece of writing will never be an exact science, implementing the simple techniques discussed above can make the process less subjective and even less agonizing. 

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• 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.

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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.

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Tackling the Stack

By  Daniel Cole

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You can’t avoid it anymore: students have submitted their papers, and now you have to read, comment on and grade them. How can you give good feedback yet, at the same time, avoid overworking yourself?

Yes, you could have been done some conceptual things in advance that supposedly would have made student essays less of a grind to read, like scaffolding and assignment design . But it’s too late for that; there sits the stack, digitally or otherwise. Or maybe you have, in fact, done those things but, regardless, a monster number of essays awaits you.

And, of course, you use abbreviations and give keys to your students, or assign keyboard quick keys to often-used comments. Maybe you use rubrics. But still … there sits the stack.

It’s worth pausing to think through the time it should take to grade an essay. Consider that the average adult reading pace is around 250 words per minute of presumably polished prose; this may be roughly one page per minute of a student essay with standard formatting and maybe not-so-polished prose. That works out to at least six minutes to simply read a 1,500-word student essay. How many more minutes to credibly write comments and determine a grade? It could be a total 10 to 15 minutes, at least, to grade a single essay of that length. That can be a struggle for instructors who have more than 30 total students.

And before going further, I should also say that I’m among the lucky ones. I teach full-time on one campus, so I’m typically required each term to read and formally grade some 390,000 words produced by about 65 students. Some of you teach on multiple campuses and have a great many more students. Also, the calculations I’ve done above, along with the fact that many higher education institutions rely on contingent faculty, should play into discussions of course caps and personnel structures.

Unfortunately, the ideas I want to share won’t solve such deeply embedded structural issues. But I hope they can help other instructors cope a bit more in the day to day. So back to the narrow problem at hand: the stack’s haunting you, and you want it done, but you don’t want to shortchange your students. And they also, rightly, want feedback sooner rather than later. Here are a few simple suggestions.

Sit on your hands. Read a bit of each essay and get a sense of things before pouncing with the marking pen or comment box. This restraint may keep you out of the trap of overmarking and overwhelming the student. Concision is better in end comments, too. Most students don’t want long epistles; they want focused, actionable feedback.

Ride the tortoise. If you’re like me, you’re shocked by the screen-time reports from your phone. No way I’m online that much! Well, you can also tap into hidden time and melt the stack with a simple habit. I call it 2x2e: grading two papers in a sitting at least twice a day.

When you only require yourself to grade two essays in a given moment, you tame the daunting tyranny of the stack. Dodging that pressure also helps you be more present for each essay, and students can certainly see the difference between thoughtful and rushed feedback.

You may also find that your momentum carries you to more than two essays. Even if it doesn’t, following 2x2e means you will get at least 20 essays graded over the course of a workweek. That may be a large or small slice of your load, but you’ll find that this steady effort will cause the stack to seem to melt away, and you’ll also will have some sense of control.

The principle here is the tortoise and the hare, and it is surprisingly powerful. Consistent effort outperforms trying to race through the stack. You can adapt those numbers, and of course, you sometimes need to make a big push. Also, you may well find, given your course load, that you regularly have to read, say, at least five or six or more papers at each sitting. But definitely make a deal with yourself to grade at least x number of papers a day.

Avoid the rabbit hole. It’s too easy to get lost in a student essay—mulling and agonizing over accurate diagnoses and best suggestions—and lose large chunks of time. To avoid that, set a timer for a target time to grade an essay. You’re not racing the clock; you’re just reminding yourself that time is passing. That can help you work the trees without getting lost in the forest.

Look mainly for what you value most. You don’t need a gridded-out rubric for this. Let’s say that, whatever else students do, you mostly want them to provide solid evidence and clear claims. So are they doing that? Grade and comment accordingly. Or maybe you want to see they’ve grasped a key concept adequately. Well, have they? Grade and comment accordingly.

Give a secondary and tertiary level of ink (or pixels) to your secondary or tertiary concerns. And more good news: this focused, less-is-more approach is clearer to students and thus more useful and less overwhelming for them.

Play home inspector. Home inspectors don’t move into the houses they examine. They go straight to trouble spots—the foundation, the roof, the wiring and so on. You can evaluate an essay the same way. Start by reading just the introduction and the conclusion. Read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Does the student present a chain of reasoning? What sense of the essay does that yield? Read more of the essay to confirm patterns and impressions.

Some faculty members may not be comfortable with this approach and feel they must go through each paper as a natural reader. I get that, and I won’t try to change your mind. But I’ve found that it has helped me quickly get my bearings when reviewing an essay.

So that’s it. Admittedly, these suggestions are no magic wand that will make the stack disappear. Sometimes you have to grind, and there’s no getting around it. Still, I’ve personally found these ideas helpful and hope they can make grading less of a millstone for you, too. You may feel more in control, as well as more confident that you’re providing students with helpful feedback.

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SAT Essay Rubric: Full Analysis and Writing Strategies

We're about to dive deep into the details of that least beloved* of SAT sections, the SAT essay . Prepare for a discussion of the SAT essay rubric and how the SAT essay is graded based on that. I'll break down what each item on the rubric means and what you need to do to meet those requirements.

On the SAT, the last section you'll encounter is the (optional) essay. You have 50 minutes to read a passage, analyze the author's argument, and write an essay. If you don’t write on the assignment, plagiarize, or don't use your own original work, you'll get a 0 on your essay. Otherwise, your essay scoring is done by two graders - each one grades you on a scale of 1-4 in Reading, Analysis, and Writing, for a total essay score out of 8 in each of those three areas . But how do these graders assign your writing a numerical grade? By using an essay scoring guide, or rubric.

*may not actually be the least belovèd.

Feature image credit: Day 148: the end of time by Bruce Guenter , used under CC BY 2.0 /Cropped from original. 

UPDATE: SAT Essay No Longer Offered

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In January 2021, the College Board announced that after June 2021, it would no longer offer the Essay portion of the SAT (except at schools who opt in during School Day Testing). It is now no longer possible to take the SAT Essay, unless your school is one of the small number who choose to offer it during SAT School Day Testing.

While most colleges had already made SAT Essay scores optional, this move by the College Board means no colleges now require the SAT Essay. It will also likely lead to additional college application changes such not looking at essay scores at all for the SAT or ACT, as well as potentially requiring additional writing samples for placement.

What does the end of the SAT Essay mean for your college applications? Check out our article on the College Board's SAT Essay decision for everything you need to know.

The Complete SAT Essay Grading Rubric: Item-by-Item Breakdown

Based on the CollegeBoard’s stated Reading, Analysis, and Writing criteria, I've created the below charts (for easier comparison across score points). For the purpose of going deeper into just what the SAT is looking for in your essay, I've then broken down each category further (with examples).

The information in all three charts is taken from the College Board site .

The biggest change to the SAT essay (and the thing that really distinguishes it from the ACT essay) is that you are required to read and analyze a text , then write about your analysis of the author's argument in your essay. Your "Reading" grade on the SAT essay reflects how well you were able to demonstrate your understanding of the text and the author's argument in your essay.

You'll need to show your understanding of the text on two different levels: the surface level of getting your facts right and the deeper level of getting the relationship of the details and the central ideas right.

Surface Level: Factual Accuracy

One of the most important ways you can show you've actually read the passage is making sure you stick to what is said in the text . If you’re writing about things the author didn’t say, or things that contradict other things the author said, your argument will be fundamentally flawed.

For instance, take this quotation from a (made-up) passage about why a hot dog is not a sandwich:

“The fact that you can’t, or wouldn’t, cut a hot dog in half and eat it that way, proves that a hot dog is once and for all NOT a sandwich”

Here's an example of a factually inaccurate paraphrasing of this quotation:

The author builds his argument by discussing how, since hot-dogs are often served cut in half, this makes them different from sandwiches.

The paraphrase contradicts the passage, and so would negatively affect your reading score. Now let's look at an accurate paraphrasing of the quotation:

The author builds his argument by discussing how, since hot-dogs are never served cut in half, they are therefore different from sandwiches.

It's also important to be faithful to the text when you're using direct quotations from the passage. Misquoting or badly paraphrasing the author’s words weakens your essay, because the evidence you’re using to support your points is faulty.

Higher Level: Understanding of Central Ideas

The next step beyond being factually accurate about the passage is showing that you understand the central ideas of the text and how details of the passage relate back to this central idea.

Why does this matter? In order to be able to explain why the author is persuasive, you need to be able to explain the structure of the argument. And you can’t deconstruct the author's argument if you don’t understand the central idea of the passage and how the details relate to it.

Here's an example of a statement about our fictional "hot dogs are sandwiches" passage that shows understanding of the central idea of the passage:

Hodgman’s third primary defense of why hot dogs are not sandwiches is that a hot dog is not a subset of any other type of food. He uses the analogy of asking the question “is cereal milk a broth, sauce, or gravy?” to show that making such a comparison between hot dogs and sandwiches is patently illogical.

The above statement takes one step beyond merely being factually accurate to explain the relation between different parts of the passage (in this case, the relation between the "what is cereal milk?" analogy and the hot dog/sandwich debate).

Of course, if you want to score well in all three essay areas, you’ll need to do more in your essay than merely summarizing the author’s argument. This leads directly into the next grading area of the SAT Essay.

The items covered under this criterion are the most important when it comes to writing a strong essay. You can use well-spelled vocabulary in sentences with varied structure all you want, but if you don't analyze the author's argument, demonstrate critical thinking, and support your position, you will not get a high Analysis score .

Because this category is so important, I've broken it down even further into its two different (but equally important) component parts to make sure everything is as clearly explained as possible.

Part I: Critical Thinking (Logic)

Critical thinking, also known as critical reasoning, also known as logic, is the skill that SAT essay graders are really looking to see displayed in the essay. You need to be able to evaluate and analyze the claim put forward in the prompt. This is where a lot of students may get tripped up, because they think “oh, well, if I can just write a lot, then I’ll do well.” While there is some truth to the assertion that longer essays tend to score higher , if you don’t display critical thinking you won’t be able to get a top score on your essay.

What do I mean by critical thinking? Let's take the previous prompt example:

Write an essay in which you explain how Hodgman builds an argument to persuade his audience that the hot dog cannot, and never should be, considered a sandwich.

An answer to this prompt that does not display critical thinking (and would fall into a 1 or 2 on the rubric) would be something like:

The author argues that hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, which is persuasive to the reader.

While this does evaluate the prompt (by providing a statement that the author's claim "is persuasive to the reader"), there is no corresponding analysis. An answer to this prompt that displays critical thinking (and would net a higher score on the rubric) could be something like this:

The author uses analogies to hammer home his point that hot dogs are not sandwiches. Because the readers will readily believe the first part of the analogy is true, they will be more likely to accept that the second part (that hot dogs aren't sandwiches) is true as well.

See the difference? Critical thinking involves reasoning your way through a situation (analysis) as well as making a judgement (evaluation) . On the SAT essay, however, you can’t just stop at abstract critical reasoning - analysis involves one more crucial step...

Part II: Examples, Reasons, and Other Evidence (Support)

The other piece of the puzzle (apparently this is a tiny puzzle) is making sure you are able to back up your point of view and critical thinking with concrete evidence . The SAT essay rubric says that the best (that is, 4-scoring) essay uses “ relevant, sufficient, and strategically chosen support for claim(s) or point(s) made. ” This means you can’t just stick to abstract reasoning like this:

That explanation is a good starting point, but if you don't back up your point of view with quoted or paraphrased information from the text to support your discussion of the way the author builds his/her argument, you will not be able to get above a 3 on the Analysis portion of the essay (and possibly the Reading portion as well, if you don't show you've read the passage). Let's take a look of an example of how you might support an interpretation of the author's effect on the reader using facts from the passage :

The author’s reference to the Biblical story about King Solomon elevates the debate about hot dogs from a petty squabble between friends to a life-or-death disagreement. The reader cannot help but see the parallels between the two situations and thus find themselves agreeing with the author on this point.

Does the author's reference to King Solomon actually "elevate the debate," causing the reader to agree with the author? From the sentences above, it certainly seems plausible that it might. While your facts do need to be correct,  you get a little more leeway with your interpretations of how the author’s persuasive techniques might affect the audience. As long as you can make a convincing argument for the effect a technique the author uses might have on the reader, you’ll be good.

Say whaaat?! #tbt by tradlands , used under CC BY 2.0 /Cropped and color-adjusted from original.

Did I just blow your mind? Read more about the secrets the SAT doesn’t want you to know in this article . 

Your Writing score on the SAT essay is not just a reflection of your grasp of the conventions of written English (although it is that as well). You'll also need to be focused, organized, and precise.

Because there's a lot of different factors that go into calculating your Writing score, I've divided the discussion of this rubric area into five separate items:

Precise Central Claim

Organization, vocab and word choice, sentence structure, grammar, etc..

One of the most basic rules of the SAT essay is that you need to express a clear opinion on the "assignment" (the prompt) . While in school (and everywhere else in life, pretty much) you’re encouraged to take into account all sides of a topic, it behooves you to NOT do this on the SAT essay. Why? Because you only have 50 minutes to read the passage, analyze the author's argument, and write the essay, there's no way you can discuss every single way in which the author builds his/her argument, every single detail of the passage, or a nuanced argument about what works and what doesn't work.

Instead, I recommend focusing your discussion on a few key ways the author is successful in persuading his/her audience of his/her claim.

Let’s go back to the assignment we've been using as an example throughout this article:

"Write an essay in which you explain how Hodgman builds an argument to persuade his audience that the hot dog cannot, and never should be, considered a sandwich."

Your instinct (trained from many years of schooling) might be to answer:

"There are a variety of ways in which the author builds his argument."

This is a nice, vague statement that leaves you a lot of wiggle room. If you disagree with the author, it's also a way of avoiding having to say that the author is persuasive. Don't fall into this trap! You do not necessarily have to agree with the author's claim in order to analyze how the author persuades his/her readers that the claim is true.

Here's an example of a precise central claim about the example assignment:

The author effectively builds his argument that hot dogs are not sandwiches by using logic, allusions to history and mythology, and factual evidence.

In contrast to the vague claim that "There are a variety of ways in which the author builds his argument," this thesis both specifies what the author's argument is and the ways in which he builds the argument (that you'll be discussing in the essay).

While it's extremely important to make sure your essay has a clear point of view, strong critical reasoning, and support for your position, that's not enough to get you a top score. You need to make sure that your essay  "demonstrates a deliberate and highly effective progression of ideas both within paragraphs and throughout the essay."

What does this mean? Part of the way you can make sure your essay is "well organized" has to do with following standard essay construction points. Don't write your essay in one huge paragraph; instead, include an introduction (with your thesis stating your point of view), body paragraphs (one for each example, usually), and a conclusion. This structure might seem boring, but it really works to keep your essay organized, and the more clearly organized your essay is, the easier it will be for the essay grader to understand your critical reasoning.

The second part of this criteria has to do with keeping your essay focused, making sure it contains "a deliberate and highly effective progression of ideas." You can't just say "well, I have an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, so I guess my essay is organized" and expect to get a 4/4 on your essay. You need to make sure that each paragraph is also organized . Recall the sample prompt:

“Write an essay in which you explain how Hodgman builds an argument to persuade his audience that the hot dog cannot, and never should be, considered a sandwich.”

And our hypothetical thesis:

Let's say that you're writing the paragraph about the author's use of logic to persuade his reader that hot dogs aren't sandwiches. You should NOT just list ways that the author is logical in support of his claim, then explain why logic in general is an effective persuasive device. While your points might all be valid, your essay would be better served by connecting each instance of logic in the passage with an explanation of how that example of logic persuades the reader to agree with the author.

Above all, it is imperative that you make your thesis (your central claim) clear in the opening paragraph of your essay - this helps the grader keep track of your argument. There's no reason you’d want to make following your reasoning more difficult for the person grading your essay (unless you’re cranky and don’t want to do well on the essay. Listen, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life).

In your essay, you should use a wide array of vocabulary (and use it correctly). An essay that scores a 4 in Writing on the grading rubric “demonstrates a consistent use of precise word choice.”

You’re allowed a few errors, even on a 4-scoring essay, so you can sometimes get away with misusing a word or two. In general, though, it’s best to stick to using words you are certain you not only know the meaning of, but also know how to use. If you’ve been studying up on vocab, make sure you practice using the words you’ve learned in sentences, and have those sentences checked by someone who is good at writing (in English), before you use those words in an SAT essay.

Creating elegant, non-awkward sentences is the thing I struggle most with under time pressure. For instance, here’s my first try at the previous sentence: “Making sure a sentence structure makes sense is the thing that I have the most problems with when I’m writing in a short amount of time” (hahaha NOPE - way too convoluted and wordy, self). As another example, take a look at these two excerpts from the hypothetical essay discussing how the author persuaded his readers that a hot dog is not a sandwich:

Score of 2: "The author makes his point by critiquing the argument against him. The author pointed out the logical fallacy of saying a hot dog was a sandwich because it was meat "sandwiched" between two breads. The author thus persuades the reader his point makes sense to be agreed with and convinces them."

The above sentences lack variety in structure (they all begin with the words "the author"), and the last sentence has serious flaws in its structure (it makes no sense).

Score of 4: "The author's rigorous examination of his opponent's position invites the reader, too, to consider this issue seriously. By laying out his reasoning, step by step, Hodgman makes it easy for the reader to follow along with his train of thought and arrive at the same destination that he has. This destination is Hodgman's claim that a hot dog is not a sandwich."

The above sentences demonstrate variety in sentence structure (they don't all begin with the same word and don't have the same underlying structure) that presumably forward the point of the essay.

In general, if you're doing well in all the other Writing areas, your sentence structures will also naturally vary. If you're really worried that your sentences are not varied enough, however, my advice for working on "demonstrating meaningful variety in sentence structure" (without ending up with terribly worded sentences) is twofold:

• Read over what you’ve written before you hand it in and change any wordings that seem awkward, clunky, or just plain incorrect.
• As you’re doing practice essays, have a friend, family member, or teacher who is good at (English) writing look over your essays and point out any issues that arise. 

This part of the Writing grade is all about the nitty gritty details of writing: grammar, punctuation, and spelling . It's rare that an essay with serious flaws in this area can score a 4/4 in Reading, Analysis, or Writing, because such persistent errors often "interfere with meaning" (that is, persistent errors make it difficult for the grader to understand what you're trying to get across).

On the other hand, if they occur in small quantities, grammar/punctuation/spelling errors are also the things that are most likely to be overlooked. If two essays are otherwise of equal quality, but one writer misspells "definitely" as "definately" and the other writer fails to explain how one of her examples supports her thesis, the first writer will receive a higher essay score. It's only when poor grammar, use of punctuation, and spelling start to make it difficult to understand your essay that the graders start penalizing you.

My advice for working on this rubric area is the same advice as for sentence structure: look over what you’ve written to double check for mistakes, and ask someone who’s good at writing to look over your practice essays and point out your errors. If you're really struggling with spelling, simply typing up your (handwritten) essay into a program like Microsoft Word and running spellcheck can alert you to problems. We've also got a great set of articles up on our blog about SAT Writing questions that may help you better understand any grammatical errors you are making.

How Do I Use The SAT Essay Grading Rubric?

Now that you understand the SAT essay rubric, how can you use it in your SAT prep? There are a couple of different ways.

Use The SAT Essay Rubric To...Shape Your Essays

Since you know what the SAT is looking for in an essay, you can now use that knowledge to guide what you write about in your essays!

A tale from my youth: when I was preparing to take the SAT for the first time, I did not really know what the essay was looking for, and assumed that since I was a good writer, I’d be fine.

Not true! The most important part of the SAT essay is using specific examples from the passage and explaining how they convince the reader of the author's point. By reading this article and realizing there's more to the essay than "being a strong writer," you’re already doing better than high school me.

Change the object in that girl’s left hand from a mirror to a textbook and you have a pretty good sketch of what my junior year of high school looked like.

Use The SAT Essay Rubric To...Grade Your Practice Essays

The SAT can’t exactly give you an answer key to the essay. Even when an example of an essay that scored a particular score is provided, that essay will probably use different examples than you did, make different arguments, maybe even argue different interpretations of the text...making it difficult to compare the two. The SAT essay rubric is the next best thing to an answer key for the essay - use it as a lens through which to view and assess your essay.

Of course, you don’t have the time to become an expert SAT essay grader - that’s not your job. You just have to apply the rubric as best as you can to your essays and work on fixing your weak areas . For the sentence structure, grammar, usage, and mechanics stuff I highly recommend asking a friend, teacher, or family member who is really good at (English) writing to take a look over your practice essays and point out the mistakes.

If you really want custom feedback on your practice essays from experienced essay graders, may I also suggest the PrepScholar test prep platform ? I manage the essay grading and so happen to know quite a bit about the essay part of this platform, which gives you both an essay grade and custom feedback for each essay you complete. Learn more about how it all works here .

What’s Next?

Are you so excited by this article that you want to read even more articles on the SAT essay? Of course you are. Don't worry, I’ve got you covered. Learn how to write an SAT essay step-by-step and read about the 6 types of SAT essay prompts .

Want to go even more in depth with the SAT essay? We have a complete list of past SAT essay prompts as well as tips and strategies for how to get a 12 on the SAT essay .

Still not satisfied? Maybe a five-day free trial of our very own PrepScholar test prep platform (which includes essay practice and feedback) is just what you need.

Trying to figure out whether the old or new SAT essay is better for you? Take a look at our article on the new SAT essay assignment to find out!

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Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master's degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel in high school.

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• 10 Tips for Grading Essays Quickly and Efficiently

We’ve all been there. No one likes marking. But as a professor, it’s part of the job description. One of the draft titles of this post was even “How to Grade Essays Without Wanting to Commit Murder.” While there are some great guides on teaching the mechanics of grading available, there isn’t much useful advice on how to make grading easier apart from either having fewer assignments or providing less feedback. In the real world, neither one of these is very useful. But there are strategies that every instructor or professor can follow to make grading essays quicker and more efficient. Here are some of mine.

1) Have Faith in Yourself

One of the biggest problems I’ve faced and continue to face as an instructor is Imposter Syndrome, or the belief that I’ve somehow fooled everyone around me into believing that I am a knowledgeable and competent person. Grading is one area where Imposter Syndrome likes to rear its ugly head. You will have finished reading a paper and then start to doubt that you’ve given it an appropriate grade. Or you worry that your students will get mad at you for giving them a bad grade. Or you’ll worry that this paper will result in a grade dispute, and then real professors will review and judge your work and find you wanting. Resist these thoughts. Remember that you have the expertise and good judgement to evaluate essays. Do not second-guess yourself. Assign a grade, make your comments, and move on. Have faith that you have done your best.

2) Don’t Repeat Yourself

It’s very common in research essays to see that same mistake made more than once. This is particularly the case when it comes to footnotes and bibliographies, which are often filled with tiny mistakes. Don’t spend all your time correcting these mistakes. Fix it once, and explain what you did. If you see it again, circle it and write something like “see previous comment on…” If it’s a systematic problem, I’d then make a note to mention this problem in the comments and say that you’ve only corrected a couple of instances to give them an idea of how to do it properly. This is not high school, and it is not your job to find every single mistake on an essay and correct it. Instead, identify the problem, and give your student an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned. The same goes for grammar and spelling. If it’s a serious issue, I always recommend that students go see the Writing Centre. It’s not your job to teach them how to write (unless it’s a composition class, in which case, good luck!)

3) Create a Comment Bank

You’ll notice that after a while, you will repeat the same sentences over and over again. To save yourself from having to either remember what you said last time or type or to write the same sentence over and over again, create a Word document with your most common comments. This is sometimes referred to as a Comment Bank or a Teaching Toolbox. I will do a whole blog post on this in the near future, but it’s easy to get started. If you save your comments on your computer, read through them and copy and paste the most common into a new Word document. For example, one that I use a lot is “While I can see that you are trying to make an argument here, you spend too much time describing or summarizing your sources rather than analysing them. In general, you should avoid description as much as possible.” The time and frustration you will save is immeasurable

4) Create a Bibliographic Bank

Odds are you will receive several papers on a given topic. Once you’ve been marking for a while, you’ll notice that you keep recommending the same books or articles. Again, to save you from having to remember which sources you want to recommend and/or typing out the full references, create a Word document with a list of topics and some of the most important sources listed for each. This way you only do the research once, rather than a million times. This is also helpful if you want to evaluate whether your students have selected appropriate sources or have missed important ones. Your comps list can be a great starting point.

5) Make a Grading Conversion Chart

In general, most assignments require three different “grades”: a letter grade, a percentage, and a numeric grade (like 7 out of 10). They each have their own purposes, but the odds are you will need to convert between them. Even when working at one institution for many years, it can be hard to do this conversion in your head. Spend several years as a sessional at multiple universities with their own ideas about what each letter grade means, and the problem grows exponentially. My solution is is to use an Excel spreadsheet of grades. This is relative easy to create. Mine look like this:

It’s really easy to do. Each “out of” number has three columns. The first is a numeric grade. The second is that grade converted to a percentage (it’s easier to do with a formula, and then just do “fill down.”) The third column is the corresponding letter grade. You can fill these in manually, or you can use a formula.

Here’s mine, but make sure yours corresponds to your institution’s grading scheme! =IF(K19>=95%,”A+”,IF(K19>90%,”A”,IF(K19>=85%,”A “, IF(K19>=80%,”B+”, IF(K19>=75%,”B”,IF(K19>70%,”B-“, IF(K19>65%,”C+”,IF(K19>60%,”C”,IF(K19>55%,”C”, IF(K19>50%,”P”,IF(K19>0%,”NC”,)))))))))))

6) Mark in Batches

I like to run, and when you’re really tired and facing a long run, thinking of the time remaining in intervals makes it much easier. The same is true for marking. A stack of 100 essays seems insurmountable. So what I do is break that stack down into manageable groups, usually 3 or 5 essays, which is about an hour to an hour and a half of grading, depending on the length of the essay. I sit down, grade those essays, type the comments up, put the grades into my grading sheet, and then take a break of at least 45 minutes. This is part of the SMART goal system (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound). It really does help make the grading feel achievable while also ensuring that you are giving your mind a break every one in a while. Once you’ve finished your batch, either set them aside in a different location or put a tick or some kind of mark on them so you can easily tell that they are all finished.

7) When in Doubt, Roll Up

Many essays seem to fall in a valley between one grade and the next, like when you’re not sure if it’s a B- or a B. In these cases, I almost always roll up. This was advice that I got when I was a TA, and it stuck with me. Try to give your students the benefit of the doubt. Remember that university is hard. Many students take multiple classes and/or work while in school. If you are dealing with a paper on the borderline between one grade and the next, or your paper is within 1 to 2% of rolling to the next letter grade, then just bump the grade. It’s always better to err on the side of generosity. And giving someone a 69.5% instead of a 70% is just a bit of a dick move.

8) Don’t Waste Your Time

There will be essays that are so bad that they defy all explanation. Either there are no footnotes or bibliography, the essay is 3 pages when it was supposed to be 8, or the student just completely ignored your instructions. In other words, it’s obvious that the student just doesn’t care. Don’t waste your time commenting on these papers. If your student can’t be bothered to read the instructions, then you have no obligation to spend your precious time marking the paper. I usually place a comment to the effect of: “I would strongly recommend that you review the requirements for this assignment, which can be found on the Research Assignment Instructions sheet.” I find that this is firm, but fair. Save your energy for the students who really put effort into their papers, even when they don’t succeed.

9) If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Say Something Nice Anyways

Students are humans (though it’s easy to forget this sometimes…), and respond best to positive reinforcement. So try to find something good to say about the essay. Some suggestions, courtesy of my good friend Clare include: “Nice margins!” “Excellent choice of font!” On a more serious note, I usually go with something like “This is a great effort!” or “I can see that you are trying here!” I always use the positive-negative-positive sandwich. Put a positive comment, then a negative comment, and then another positive comment. This tends to motivate students to do better rather than just feel defeated. Remember, your job is to encourage students to learn, so make them feel like you are invested in their success.

Expert Tip: One variation on the positive-negative-positive sandwich comes courtesy of my friend Teva Vidal: “The “shit sandwich” is for kids who deserve detailed feedback but who just missed the mark: start off with the main strengths of what they wrote, then lay it on thick with what they screwed up, then end on a positive note in terms of how they can use what they’ve already got going for them to make it better in the future.

10) Try to find some joy in the work

You know how “Time flies when you’re having fun”? Well, this approach can help with marking. Try to have a sense of humour about the whole thing. There will be times when you become angry or frustrated because it seems like students are ignoring your instructions and therefore losing marks unnecessarily. Laughing this off will help. Some professors like to collect so-called “dumb” sentences and post them online. There are a number of ethical problems with that that I will not get into here. But I can and have shared them with my husband when I’m grading in the room with him. We can laugh together and I blow off steam (Saving your marriage through marking! I can see my husband laughing right now). I also like to mark with a bright pink pen, since it’s hard to get mad when you’re writing in pink ink.

—————————————-

So those are my suggestions for making the grading of essays a little more pleasant. I think the most important takeaway is that it’s worth spending the time to create tools. For many years, I would waste time researching lists of sources, writing out the same comments, and using a calculator. But my time, and yours, is precious, so work smart, not hard (this is becoming something of a motto…). Any other tips for grading essays quickly and efficiently? Let me know in the comments below!

So You Want to be a Sessional

essays expert tip grading Sessional work smart not hard

November 18, 2017 at 7:59 am

Many thanks for this! Found it really useful while I’m grading my mid-terms 🙂 The comment about imposter syndrome resonated with me – I’m always second guessing if I should grade higher or lower, or leave it. Most times, I re-read the essay and see that my grading was actually fair first time around.

November 18, 2017 at 5:00 pm

Same here! I still struggle with this, and I’ve been teaching for nearly ten years! Glad I could help!

October 16, 2019 at 3:32 pm

Im a new tertiary level lecturer and I am finding marking the most insightful way to udnerstand how students think. Some of the papers I have marked recently have been indescribable, incomprehnsible and just mere reflections of what I am defining as ‘laziness’. To justify this definition I thought long and hard and finally realised that if it took me truck loads of hours to get it right on essay writing, and to Masters level thats a lot of assignments.  So when I really feel confused I reflect back on my own learning experiences and use that as a secondary standard with the marking rubric the primary standard…I refuse to compromise my standards of learning just to enable a lazy student to maintain theirs.

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Grading Writing: Six Suggestions

You’ve developed meaningful writing assignments, and now it’s time to grade them. This tip offers six suggestions for grading student writing with links to additional resources. But, first, let’s acknowledge that grading writing is hard work, challenging for faculty and students alike.

Grading Dilemmas

For many instructors, grading papers is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. Cognitively demanding and time-consuming, grading papers requires a number of complicated considerations. What should be valued in the final product? How much weight should be given to the elements of a paper? What is the most effective way to communicate an evaluation to a student writer? How much time should be spent on each paper? How will graded papers affect student motivation?

Adding to the challenge of grading papers is the pressure to differentiate student performance and justify evaluations. Such pressures can often lead to an over-emphasis on quantifiable features of writing (number of grammar errors, number of sources, formatting technicalities, etc.) at the expense of the relative quality of thinking and development evident in students’ work.

For students, graded papers can be stressful and disappointing learning experiences, fueled by the perception that instructors grade idiosyncratically and inconsistently across the curriculum (Diederich, French & Carleton, 1961; Thaiss & Zawacki, 2006). Writing under such conditions can lead to risk-averse thinking, generic “all-about” papers, and increased plagiarism. As James Lang points out in Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (2013), high-stakes, end-of the term writing assignments with an uncertain expectation of success are especially prone to plagiarism.

What to do?

To provide more consistency, transparency, efficiency, and perhaps even enjoyment to the grading process, consider the following strategies for grading student writing.

• Offer an evaluation after you have responded first as a reader. Treating student writing first and foremost as a form of communication rather than an object of evaluation shifts the focus away from grade justification. Research on undergraduate writing indicates that what students most value is that their “papers have been read, as pieces of communication, by a real human being, who then responds as a reader” (Gottschalk & Hjortshoj, 2003, p. 53). Read more about responding to student writing .
• Provide grading criteria in advance and use the criteria to teach and support writing. When introduced early in the assignment cycle, grading criteria can serve as valuable guidelines for students. By the time a student receives a mark for their work, it should be clear how the criteria are rooted in values introduced and taught earlier. One of the most common forms that grading criteria take are rubrics. Read more about developing grading rubrics .
• When possible, consider the entire writing process (outlines, drafts, peer feedback, etc.) as part of the final evaluation. If students receive credit for completing various stages of composition and revision, then the summative assessment that comes on the final essay will be viewed in context and as part of a broader process. Valuing the entire writing process can also result in better papers and reduce instances of plagiarism. Read more about portfolio grading .
• Include student perspective in the final grade. Having students submit brief cover letters reflecting on their papers’ strengths and weaknesses enables a dialogical approach to evaluation. The instructor’s final comments can often extend insights that the student has already articulated about their essay. Read more about student reflection .
• Provide substantive feedback earlier in the writing process, not on the final paper. Studies routinely show that instructor feedback is better given when it can lead to revision and when it is not obscured by an accompanying grade. Read more about using fewer comments and minimal marking strategies .
• Separate the comments from the grade. To ensure that students have read your comments, return the writing first and then follow up (via email or Moodle) with the evaluation score.

Any other ideas?

What strategies do you use when grading student writing? Please consider sharing your strategies in the comments section below.

Diederich, P.B., French, J.W., & Carlton, S.T. (1961). Factors in judgments of writing ability. ETS Bulletins Research Series, 1961(2), i-93.

Gottschalk, K.,  & Hjortshoj, K. (2003). The elements of teaching writing: A resource for instructors in all disciplines . New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s.

Lang, J. (2013). Cheating lessons: Learning from academic dishonesty . Boston: Harvard University Press.

Thaiss, C., & Zawacki, T. (2006). Engaged writers and dynamic disciplines: Research on the academic writing life . Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Further support

For further support, see the Teaching with Writing resource pages, including sample assignments and syllabi. As many of you know, our WAC program also hosts the popular Teaching with Writing event series . Each semester, this series offers free workshops and discussions. Visit us online . To schedule a phone, virtual, or face-to-face teaching consultation, click here.

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• v.13(2); Summer 2014

Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)

Jeffrey schinske.

*Department of Biology, De Anza College, Cupertino, CA 95014

Kimberly Tanner

† Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132

The authors explore a history of grading and review the literature regarding the purposes and impacts of grading. They then suggest strategies for making grading more supportive of learning, including balancing accuracy-based and effort-based grading, using self/peer evaluation, curtailing curved grading, and exercising skepticism about the meaning of grades.

INTRODUCTION

When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking systems. —I. E. Finkelstein (1913)

If your current professional position involves teaching in a formal classroom setting, you are likely familiar with the process of assigning final course grades. Last time you assigned grades, did you assign an “E,” “E+,” or “E−” to any of your students? Likely you assigned variations on “A’s,” “B’s,” “C’s,” “D’s,” and “F’s.” Have you wondered what happened to the “E’s” or talked with colleagues about their mysterious absence from the grading lexicon? While we often commiserate about the process of assigning grades, which may be as stressful for instructors as for students, the lack of conversation among instructors about the mysterious omission of the “E” is but one indicator of the many tacit assumptions we all make about the processes of grading in higher education. Given that the time and stress associated with grading has the potential to distract instructors from other, more meaningful aspects of teaching and learning, it is perhaps time to begin scrutinizing our tacit assumptions surrounding grading. Below, we explore a brief history of grading in higher education in the United States. This is followed by considerations of the potential purposes of grading and insights from research literature that has explored the influence of grading on teaching and learning. In particular, does grading provide feedback for students that can promote learning? How might grades motivate struggling students? What are the origins of norm-referenced grading—also known as curving? And, finally, to what extent does grading provide reliable information about student learning and mastery of concepts? We end by offering four potential adjustments to our general approach to grading in undergraduate science courses for instructors to consider.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GRADING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

It can be easy to perceive grades as both fixed and inevitable—without origin or evolution … Yet grades have not always been a part of education in the United States. — Schneider and Hutt (2013 )

Surprisingly, the letter grades most of us take for granted did not gain widespread popularity until the 1940s. Even as late as 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the United States used letter grades ( National Education Association, 1971 ). It is therefore helpful to contextualize the subject to appreciate the relatively young and constantly changing nature of current systems of grading. While not an exhaustive history, the sections below describe some of the main developments leading to the current dominant grading system.

Early 19th Century and Before

The earliest forms of grading consisted of exit exams before awarding of a degree, as seen at Harvard as early as 1646 ( Smallwood, 1935 ). Some schools also awarded medals based on competitions among students or held regular competitions to assign seats in class ( Cureton, 1971 ). Given that universities like Yale and Harvard conducted examinations and elected valedictorians and salutatorians early in the 18th century, some scale of grading must have existed. However, the first official record of a grading system surfaces in 1785 at Yale, where seniors were graded into four categories: Optimi , second Optimi , Inferiores , and Perjores ( Stiles, 1901 , cited by Smallwood, 1935 ). By 1837, Yale was also recording student credit for individual classes, not just at the completion of college studies, using a four-point scale. However, these “merit marks” were written in code and hidden from students ( Bagg, 1871 ).

Harvard and other schools soon experimented with public rankings and evaluations, noting that this resulted in “increasing [student] attention to the course of studies” and encouraged “good moral conduct” ( Harvard University, 1832 ). Concerned that such public notices would inspire competition among students, which would distract from learning, other schools used more frequent, lower-stakes “report cards” to provide feedback on achievement ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ). In 1837, at least some professors at Harvard were grading using a 100-point system ( Smallwood, 1935 ). During this same period, William and Mary placed students in categories based on attendance and conduct. The University of Michigan experimented with a variety of grading systems in the 1850s and 1860s, including various numeric and pass/fail systems ( Smallwood, 1935 ). Still, many schools at this time kept no formal records of grades ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ).

Late 19th Century and 20th Century

With schools growing rapidly in size and number and coordination between schools becoming more important, grades became one of the primary means of communication between institutions ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ). This meant grades needed to have meaning not just within an institution but also to distant third parties. A record from 1883 indicates a student at Harvard received a “B,” and in 1884, Mount Holyoke was grading on a system including “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” and “E.” Each letter corresponded to a range of percentage scores, with lower than 75% equating to an “E” and indicating failure. Mount Holyoke added an “F” grade (for failing) to the scale in 1898 and adjusted the percentages relating to the other letters ( Smallwood, 1935 ). This appears to be the initial origin of the “A”–“F” system familiar to most faculty members today, albeit including an “E” grade. By 1890, the “A”–“E” system had spread to Harvard after faculty members expressed concerns regarding reliably grading students on a 100-point scale. Still, grading was not always done at schools and grading systems varied widely ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ).

By the early 1900s, 100-point or percentage-based grading systems were very common ( Cureton, 1971 ). This period also saw an increased desire for uniformity in grading, and many expressed concerns about what grades meant from one teacher or institution to the next ( Weld, 1917 ). Numerous studies of the period sought to understand and perfect grading systems ( Cureton, 1971 ). Grading on a 100-point scale was found to be highly unreliable, with different teachers unable to assign consistent grades on papers in English, math, and history ( Starch, 1913 ). Researchers felt that getting away from a 100-point scale and grading into only five categories (e.g., letter grades) could increase reliability ( Finkelstein, 1913 , p. 18). While it is unclear exactly when and why “E” grades disappeared from the letter grade scale, it seems possible that this push to use fewer categories resulted in an “A”–“F” scale with no “E” (“F” being retained, since it so clearly stood for “fail”). Others have conjectured that “E” was removed so students would not assume “E” stood for “excellent,” but whatever the reason, “E’s” apparently disappeared by the 1930s ( Palmer, 2010 ).

As research on intellectual ability appeared to show that, like other continuous biological traits, levels of aptitude in a population conformed to a normal curve, some experts felt grades should similarly be distributed according to a curve in a classroom ( Finkelstein, 1913 ). Distributing grades according to a normal curve was therefore considered as a solution to the subjective nature of grading and a way to minimize interrater differences in grading ( Guskey, 1994 ). Others worried that measuring aptitude was different from measuring levels of classroom performance, which might not be normally distributed ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ).

Based on the above research and the pressure toward uniformity of grading systems, by the 1940s the “A”–“F” grading system was dominant, with the four-point scale and percentages still also in use ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ). However, many inconsistencies remained. As one example, Yale used no less than four different grading systems from the 1960s to 1980s ( Yale University, 2013 ).

Present Day

Grading systems remain controversial and hotly debated today ( Jaschik, 2009 ). Some argue grades are psychologically harmful ( Kohn, 1999 ). Others raise concerns about the integrity of the “A”–“F” system, given well-documented trends in grade inflation ( Rojstaczer and Healy, 2012 ). One professor summed it up by saying grades do no more than “create a facade of coherence” ( Jaschik, 2009 ). A number of colleges have abandoned numerical and categorical grading altogether, opting instead for creating contracts with students to define success or employing student self-reflection in combination with written evaluations by faculty ( Jaschik, 2009 ). Among the Ivy League schools, Brown University does not calculate grade point averages, does not use “D’s” in its grading scale, and does not record failing grades ( Brown University, 2014 ). Even Yale, the institution that started this history of grading more than 200 yr ago, is today still considering changes to its grading system ( Yale University, 2013 ).

Though grades were initially meant to serve various pedagogical purposes, more recent reforms have focused on “grades as useful tools in an organizational rather than pedagogical enterprise—tools that would facilitate movement, communication, and coordination” ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ). So, what are the potential purposes of grading in educational settings?

PURPOSES OF GRADING—PAST AND PRESENT

Grades as feedback on performance—does grading provide feedback to help students understand and improve upon their deficiencies.

[This] work affirms an observation that many classroom teachers have made about their students: if a paper is returned with both a grade and a comment, many students will pay attention to the grade and ignore the comment. — Brookhart (2008 , p. 8)

For most faculty members, the concept of feedback has at least two applications to the concept of grading. On one hand, grading itself is a form of feedback that may be useful to students. In addition, in the process of grading student work, faculty members sometimes provide written comments as feedback that students could use to improve their work. Because college students express a desire for feedback ( Higgins et al. , 2002 ), faculty members may feel pressured to grade more (rather than facilitating ungraded activities) and to provide more written feedback while grading. Especially in large classes, this can significantly increase workload on faculty ( Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006 ; Crisp, 2007 ). But are grades and written comments effective forms of feedback that assist students in achieving conceptual mastery of the subject?

Feedback is generally divided into two categories: evaluative feedback and descriptive feedback. Evaluative feedback, such as a letter grade or written praise or criticism, judges student work, while descriptive feedback provides information about how a student can become more competent ( Brookhart, 2008 , p. 26). Butler and Nisan (1986) compared the impacts of evaluative feedback, descriptive feedback, and no feedback on student achievement in problem-solving tasks and in “quantitative” tasks (e.g., those requiring quick, timed work to produce a large number of answers). They found that students receiving descriptive feedback (but not grades) on an initial assignment performed significantly better on follow-up quantitative tasks and problem-solving tasks than did students receiving grades or students receiving no feedback. Students receiving grades performed better on follow-up quantitative tasks than students receiving no feedback, but did not outperform those students on problem-solving assignments. In other words, providing evaluative feedback (in this case, grades) after a task does not appear to enhance students’ future performance in problem solving.

While descriptive, written feedback can enhance student performance on problem-solving tasks; reaping those benefits requires students to read, understand, and use the feedback. Anecdotal accounts, as well as some studies, indicate that many students do not read written feedback, much less use it to improve future work ( MacDonald, 1991 ; Crisp, 2007 ). In one study, less than half of undergraduate medical students even chose to collect the feedback provided on their essays ( Sinclair and Cleland, 2007 ). Other studies suggest that many students do read feedback and consider it carefully but the feedback is written in a way that students do not find useful in improving future work ( Higgins et al. , 2002 ). Some studies have further investigated the relationships between grading and descriptive feedback by providing students with both written feedback and grades on assignments. In these cases, the addition of written comments consistently failed to enhance student performance on follow-up tasks ( Marble et al. , 1978 ; Butler 1988 ; Pulfrey et al. , 2011 ). Brookhart (2008 , p. 8) concludes, “the grade ‘trumps’ the comment” and “comments have the best chance of being read as descriptive if they are not accompanied by a grade.” Even when written feedback is read, there is widespread agreement that instructor feedback is very difficult for students to interpret and convert into improved future performance ( Weaver, 2006 ).

Grading does not appear to provide effective feedback that constructively informs students’ future efforts. This is particularly true for tasks involving problem solving or creativity. Even when grading comes in the form of written comments, it is unclear whether students even read such comments, much less understand and act on them.

Grades as a Motivator of Student Effort—Does Grading Motivate Students to Learn?

Our results suggest…that the information routinely given in schools—that is, grades—may encourage an emphasis on quantitative aspects of learning, depress creativity, foster fear of failure, and undermine interest. — Butler and Nisan (1986 )

As described in the history of grading above, our current “A”–“F” grading system was not designed with the primary intent of motivating students. Rather, it stemmed from efforts to streamline communication between institutions and diminish the impacts of unreliable evaluation of students from teacher to teacher ( Grant and Green, 2013 ). That is not to say, however, that grades do not have an impact on student motivation and effort. At some point, every instructor has likely experienced desperate petitions from students seeking more points—a behavior that seems to speak to an underlying motivation stimulated by the grading process.

It would not be surprising to most faculty members that, rather than stimulating an interest in learning, grades primarily enhance students’ motivation to avoid receiving bad grades ( Butler and Nisan, 1986 ; Butler, 1988 ; Crooks, 1988 ; Pulfrey et al. , 2011 ). Grades appear to play on students’ fears of punishment or shame, or their desires to outcompete peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks ( Pulfrey et al. , 2011 ). Grades can dampen existing intrinsic motivation, give rise to extrinsic motivation, enhance fear of failure, reduce interest, decrease enjoyment in class work, increase anxiety, hamper performance on follow-up tasks, stimulate avoidance of challenging tasks, and heighten competitiveness ( Harter, 1978 ; Butler and Nisan, 1986 ; Butler, 1988 ; Crooks, 1988 ; Pulfrey et al. , 2011 ). Even providing encouraging, written notes on graded work does not appear to reduce the negative impacts grading exerts on motivation ( Butler, 1988 ). Rather than seeing low grades as an opportunity to improve themselves, students receiving low scores generally withdraw from class work ( Butler, 1988 ; Guskey, 1994 ). While students often express a desire to be graded, surveys indicate they would prefer descriptive comments to grades as a form of feedback ( Butler and Nisan, 1986 ).

High-achieving students on initial graded assignments appear somewhat sheltered from some of the negative impacts of grades, as they tend to maintain their interest in completing future assignments (presumably in anticipation of receiving additional good grades; Butler, 1988 ). Oettinger (2002) and Grant and Green (2013) looked specifically for positive impacts of grades as incentives for students on the threshold between grade categories in a class. They hypothesized that, for example, a student on the borderline between a “C” and a “D” in a class would be more motivated to study for a final exam than a student solidly in the middle of the “C” range. However, these studies found only minimal ( Oettinger, 2002 ) or no ( Grant and Green, 2013 ) evidence that grades motivated students to perform better on final exams under these conditions.

This is not to say that classroom evaluation is by definition harmful or a thing to avoid. Evaluation of students in the service of learning—generally including a mechanism for feedback without grade assignment—can serve to enhance learning and motivation ( Butler and Nisan, 1986 ; Crooks, 1988 ; Kitchen et al. , 2006 ). Swinton (2010) additionally found that a grading system that explicitly rewarded effort in addition to rewarding knowledge stimulated student interest in improvement. This implies that balancing accuracy-based grading with providing meaningful feedback and awarding student effort could help avoid some of the negative consequences of grading.

Rather than motivating students to learn, grading appears to, in many ways, have quite the opposite effect. Perhaps at best, grading motivates high-achieving students to continue getting high grades—regardless of whether that goal also happens to overlap with learning. At worst, grading lowers interest in learning and enhances anxiety and extrinsic motivation, especially among those students who are struggling.

Grades as a Tool for Comparing Students—Is Grading on a Curve the Fairest Way to Grade?

You definitely compete for grades in engineering; whereas you earn grades in other disciplines … I have to get one point higher on the test than the next guy so I can get the higher grade. —Student quoted in Seymour and Hewitt (1997 , p. 118)

The concept of grading on a curve arose from studies in the early 20th century suggesting that levels of aptitude, for example as measured by IQ, were distributed in the population according to a normal curve. Some then argued, if a classroom included a representative sample from the population, grades in the class should similarly be distributed according to a normal curve ( Finkelstein, 1913 ). Conforming grades to a curve held the promise of addressing some of the problems surrounding grading by making the process more scientific and consistent across classrooms ( Meyer, 1908 ). Immediately, even some proponents of curved grading recognized problems with comparing levels of aptitude in the population with levels of classroom achievement among a population of students. For a variety of reasons, a given classroom might not include a representative sample from the general population. In addition, teachers often grade based on a student's performance or accomplishment in the classroom—characteristics that differ in many ways from aptitude ( Finkelstein, 1913 ). However, despite the reservations of some teachers and researchers, curved grading steadily gained acceptance throughout much of the 20th century ( Schneider and Hutt, 2013 ).

Grading on a curve is by definition a type of “norm-referenced” grading, meaning student work is graded based on comparisons with other students’ work ( Brookhart, 2004 , p. 72). One issue surrounding norm-referenced grading is that it can dissociate grades from any meaning in terms of content knowledge and learning. Bloom (1968) pointed out that, in grading on a curve “it matters not that the failures of one year performed at about the same level as the C students of another year. Nor does it matter that the A students of one school do about as well as the F students of another school.” As this example demonstrates, under curved grading, grades might not communicate any information whatsoever regarding a student's mastery of course knowledge or skills.

Of even more concern, however, is the impact norm-referenced grading has on competition between students. The quote at the start of this section describes how many students respond to curve-graded classes compared with classes that do not use a grading curve. Seymour and Hewitt (1997 , p. 118) explain, “Curve-grading forces students to compete with each other, whether they want to or not, because it exaggerates very fine degrees of differences in performance. Where there is little or no difference in work standards, it encourages a struggle to create it.” Studies have shown that science students in competitive class environments do not learn or retain information as well as students in cooperative class environments ( Humphreys et al. , 1982 ). Students in cooperative environments are additionally more interested in learning and find learning more worthwhile than students in competitive environments ( Humphreys et al. , 1982 ). Of particular concern is that the competitive environment fostered by norm-referenced grading represents one of the factors contributing to the loss of qualified, talented, and often underrepresented college students from science fields ( Seymour and Hewitt, 1997 ; Tobias, 1990 ). Disturbingly, even when a science instructor does not grade on a curve, students might, due to their past experiences, assume a curve is used and adopt a competitive stance anyway ( Tobias, 1990 , p. 23).

Bloom (1968 , 1976 ) presents evidence and a theoretical framework supporting an alternate view of grading whereby most students would be expected to excel and not fall into the middle grades. He states, “If the students are normally distributed with respect to aptitude, but the kind and quality of instruction and the amount of time available for learning are made appropriate to the characteristics and needs of each student, the majority of students may be expected to achieve mastery of the subject. And, the relationship between aptitude and achievement should approach zero” ( Bloom, 1968 ). In other words, even if we were to accept a concept of innate aptitude that is normally distributed in a classroom, that distribution should not predict classroom achievement, provided the class environment supports diverse learners in appropriate ways. This idea was a significant development, because it freed teachers from the stigma associated with awarding a larger number of high grades. Previously, an excess of higher grades was thought to arise only from either cheating by students or poor grading practices by teachers ( Meyer, 1908 ). Bloom's model argues that, when given the proper learning environment and compared against standards of mastery in a field (rather than against one another), large numbers of students could succeed. This type of grading—where instructional goals form the basis of comparison—is called “criterion-referenced” grading ( Brookhart, 2004 , p. 72).

Of course, Bloom's work did not rule out the possibility that some teachers might still give high grades for undesirable reasons unrelated to standards of mastery (e.g., to be nice, to gain the admiration of students, etc.). Such practices would not be in line with Bloom's work and would lead to pernicious grade inflation. Indeed, many of those bemoaning recent trends in grade inflation in higher education (though less prevalent in the sciences) point to the abandonment of curved grading as a major factor ( Rojstaczer and Healy, 2012 ). Such studies often promote various forms of curving—at the level of individual courses or even at the institution as a whole—to combat inflation ( Johnson, 2003 , chaps. 7–8). In light of the above, however, it seems strange to aspire to introduce grading systems that could further push students into competition and give rise to grades that indicate little about the mastery of knowledge or skills in a subject. The broader distribution of grades under curve-adjusted grading could simply create the illusion of legitimacy in the grading system without any direct connection between grades and achievement of learning goals. Perhaps the more productive route is to push for stronger, criterion-referenced grading systems in which instructional goals, assessments, and course work are more intimately aligned.

In brief, curved grading creates a competitive classroom environment, alienates certain groups of talented students, and often results in grades unrelated to content mastery. Curving is therefore not the fairest way to assign grades.

Grades as an Objective Evaluation of Student Knowledge—Do Grades Provide Reliable Information about Student Learning?

Study Critiques Schools over Subjective Grading: An Education Expert Calls for Greater Consistency in Evaluating Students' Work. — Los Angeles Times (2009)

As evidenced by the above headline, some have criticized grading as subjective and inconsistent, meaning that the same student could receive drastically different grades for the same work, depending on who is grading the work and when it is graded. The literature indeed indicates that some forms of assessment lend themselves to greater levels of grading subjectivity than others.

Scoring multiple-choice assessments does not generally require the use of professional judgment from one paper to the next, so instructors should be able to score such assessments objectively ( Wainer and Thissen, 1993 ; Anderson, 2008 , p. 451). However, despite their advantages in terms of objective grading, studies have raised concerns regarding the blanket use of multiple-choice assessments. Problems with such assessments range from their potential to falsely indicate student understanding to the possibilities that they hamper critical thinking and exhibit bias against certain groups of students ( Towns and Robinson, 1993 ; Scouller, 1998 ; Rogers and Harley, 1999 ; Paxton, 2000 ; Dufresne et al. , 2002 ; Zimmerman and Williams, 2003 ; Stanger-Hall, 2012 ).

Grading student writing, whether in essays, reports, or constructed-response test items, opens up greater opportunities for subjectivity. Shortly after the rise in popularity of percentage-based grading systems in the early 1900s, researchers began examining teacher consistency in marking written work by students. Starch and Elliott (1912) asked 142 teachers to grade the same English paper and found that grades on the paper varied from 50 to 98% between teachers. Because different teachers awarded scores ranging from failing to exceptional, the researchers concluded “the promotion or retardation of a pupil depends to a considerable extent upon the subjective estimate of his teacher” rather than upon the actual work produced by the student ( Starch and Elliott, 1912 ). Even greater levels of inconsistency were found in teachers’ scoring of a geometry paper showing the solution to a problem ( Starch and Elliott, 1913 ).

Eells (1930) investigated the consistency of individual teachers’ grading by asking 61 teachers to grade the same history and geography papers twice—the second time 11 wk after the first. He concluded that “variability of grading is about as great in the same individual as in groups of different individuals” and that, after analysis of reliability coefficients, assignment of scores amounted to “little better than sheer guesses” ( Eells, 1930 ). Similar problems in marking reliability have been observed in higher education environments, although the degree of reliability varies dramatically, likely due to differences in instructor training, assessment type, grading system, and specific topic assessed ( Meadows and Billington, 2005 , pp. 18–20). Factors that occasionally influence an instructor's scoring of written work include the penmanship of the author ( Bull and Stevens, 1979 ), sex of the author ( Spear, 1984 ), ethnicity of the author ( Fajardo, 1985 ), level of experience of the instructor ( Weigle, 1999 ), order in which the papers are reviewed ( Farrell and Gilbert, 1960 ; Spear, 1996 ), and even the attractiveness of the author ( Bull and Stevens, 1979 ).

Designing and using rubrics to grade assignments or tests can reduce inconsistencies and make grading written work more objective. Sharing the rubrics with students can have the added benefit of enhancing learning by allowing for feedback and self-assessment ( Jonsson and Svingby, 2007 ; Reddy and Andrade, 2010 ). Consistency in grading tests can also be improved by writing longer tests with more narrowly focused questions, but this would tend to limit the types of questions that could appear on an exam ( Meadows and Billington, 2005 ).

In summary, grades often fail to provide reliable information about student learning. Grades awarded can be inconsistent both for a single instructor and among different instructors for reasons that have little to do with a students’ content knowledge or learning advances. Even multiple-choice tests, which can be graded with great consistency, have the potential to provide misleading information on student knowledge.

GRADING—STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

In part, grading practices in higher education have been driven by educational goals such as providing feedback to students, motivating students, comparing students, and measuring learning. However, much of the research literature on grading reviewed above suggests that these goals are often not being achieved with our current grading practices. Additionally, the expectations, time, and stress associated with grading may be distracting instructors from integrating other pedagogical practices that could create a more positive and effective classroom environment for learning. Below we explore several changes in approaching grading that could assist instructors in minimizing its negative influences. Kitchen et al. (2006) additionally provide an example of a high-enrollment college biology class that was redesigned to “maximize feedback and minimize the impact of grades.”

Balancing Accuracy-Based Grading with Effort-Based Grading

Multiple research studies described above suggest that the evaluative aspect of grading may distract students from a focus on learning. While evaluation will no doubt always be key in determining course grades, the entirety of students’ grades need not be based primarily on work that rewards only correct answers, such as exams and quizzes. Importantly, constructing a grading system that rewards students for participation and effort has been shown to stimulate student interest in improvement ( Swinton, 2010 ). One strategy for focusing students on the importance of effort and practice in learning is to provide students opportunities to earn credit in a course for simply doing the work, completing assigned tasks, and engaging with the material. Assessing effort and participation can happen in a variety of ways ( Bean and Peterson, 1998 ; Rocca, 2010 ). In college biology courses, clicker questions graded on participation and not correctness of responses is one strategy. Additionally, instructors can have students turn in minute papers in response to a question posed in class and reward this effort based on submission and not scientific accuracy. Perhaps most importantly, biology instructors can assign out-of-class work—case studies, concept maps, and other written assignments—that can promote student practice and focus students’ attention on key ideas, while not creating more grading work for the instructor. Those out-of-class assignments can be graded quickly (and not for accuracy) based on a simple rubric that checks whether students turned the work in on time, wrote the required minimum number of words, posed the required number of questions, and/or included a prescribed number of references. In summary, one strategy for changing grading is to balance accuracy-based grading with the awarding of some proportion of the grade based on student effort and participation. Changing grading in this way has the potential to promote student practice, incentivize in-class participation, and avoid some of the documented negative consequences of grading.

Providing Opportunities for Meaningful Feedback through Self and Peer Evaluation

Instructors often perceive grading to be a separate process from teaching and learning, yet well-crafted opportunities for evaluation can be effective tools for changing students’ ideas about biology. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) argue that, just as teaching strategies are shifting away from an instructor-centered, transmissionist approach to a more collaborative approach between instructor and students, so too should classroom feedback and grading. Because feedback traditionally has been given by the instructor and transmitted to students, Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick argue that students have been deprived of opportunities to become self-regulated learners who can detect their own errors in thinking. They advocate for incorporating techniques such as self-reflection and student dialogue into the assessment process. This, they hypothesize, would create feedback that is relevant to and understood by students and would release faculty members from some of the burden of writing descriptive feedback on student submissions. Additionally, peer review and grading practices can be the basis of in-class active-learning exercises, guided by an instructor-developed rubric. For example, students may be assigned out of class homework to construct a diagram of the flow of a carbon atom from a dead body to a coyote ( Ebert-May et al. , 2003 ). With the development of a simple rubric, students can self- or peer-evaluate these diagrams during the next class activity to check for the inclusion of key processes, as determined by the instructor. The use of in-class peer evaluation thus allows students to see other examples of biological thinking beyond their own and that of the instructor. In addition, self-evaluation of one's own work using the instructor's rubric can build metacognitive skills in assessing one's own confusions and making self-corrections. Such evaluations need not take much time, and they have the potential to provide feedback that is meaningful and integrated into the learning process. In summary, both self- and peer-evaluation of work are avenues for providing meaningful feedback without formal grading on correctness that can positively influence students' learning ( Sadler and Good, 2006 ; Freeman et al. , 2007 ; Freeman and Parks, 2010 ).

Making the Move Away from Curving

As documented in the research literature, the practice of grade curving has had unfortunate and often unintended consequences for the culture of undergraduate science classrooms, pitting students against one another as opposed to creating a collaborative learning community ( Tobias, 1990 ; Seymour and Hewitt, 1997 ). As such, one simple adjustment to grading would be to abandon grading on a curve. Because the practice of curving is often assumed by students to be practiced in science courses, a move away from curving would likely necessitate explicit and repeated communication with students to convey that they are competing only against themselves and not one another. Moving away from curving sets the expectation that all students have the opportunity to achieve the highest possible grade. Perhaps most importantly, a move away from curving practices in grading may remove a key remaining impediment to building a learning community in which students are expected to rely on and support one another in the learning process. In some instances, instructors may feel the need to use a curve when a large proportion of students perform poorly on a quiz or exam. However, an alternative approach would be to identify why students performed poorly and address this more specifically. For example, if the wording of an exam question was confusing for large numbers of students, then curving would not seem to be an appropriate response. Rather, excluding that question from analysis and in computing the exam grade would appear to be a more fair approach than curving. Additionally, if large numbers of students performed poorly on particular exam questions, providing opportunities for students to revisit, revise, and resubmit those answers for some credit would likely achieve the goal of not having large numbers of students fail. This would maintain the criterion-referenced grading system and additionally promote learning of the material that was not originally mastered. In summary, abandoning curving practices in undergraduate biology courses and explicitly conveying this to students could promote greater classroom community and student collaboration, while reducing well-documented negative consequences of this grading practice ( Humphreys et al. , 1982 ).

Becoming Skeptical about What Grades Mean

The research literature raises significant questions about what grades really measure. However, it is likely that grades will continue to be the currency of formal teaching and learning in most higher education settings for the near future. As such, perhaps the most important consideration for instructors about grading is to simply be skeptical about what grades mean. Some instructors will refuse to write letters of recommendation for students who have not achieved grades in a particular range in their course. Yet, if grades are not a reliable reflection of learning and reflect other factors—including language proficiency, cultural background, or skills in test taking—this would seem a deeply biased practice. One practical strategy for making grading more equitable is to grade student work anonymously when possible, just as one would score assays in the laboratory blind to the treatment of the sample. The use of rubrics can also help remove bias from grading ( Allen and Tanner, 2006 ) by increasing grading consistency. Perhaps most importantly, sharing grading rubrics with students can support them in identifying where their thinking has gone wrong and promote learning ( Jonsson and Svingby, 2007 ; Reddy and Andrade, 2010 ). Much is yet to be understood about what influences students’ performance in the context of formal education, and some have suggested grades may be more of a reflection of a students’ ability to understand and play the game of school than anything to do with learning ( Towns and Robinson, 1993 ; Scouller, 1998 ; Stanger-Hall, 2012 ). In summary, using tools such as rubrics and blind scoring in grading can decrease the variability and bias in grading student work. Additionally, remembering that grades are likely an inaccurate reflection of student learning can decrease assumptions instructors make about students.

IN CONCLUSION—TEACHING MORE BY GRADING LESS (OR DIFFERENTLY)

A review of the history and research on grading practices may appear to present a bleak outlook on the process of grading and its impacts on learning. However, underlying the less encouraging news about grades are numerous opportunities for faculty members to make assessment and evaluation more productive, better aligned with student learning, and less burdensome for faculty and students. Notably, many of the practices advocated in the literature would appear to involve faculty members spending less time grading. The time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching. In some cases, the demands of grading require so much instructor attention, little time remains for reflection on the structure of a course or for aspirations of pedagogical improvement. Additionally, some instructors are hesitant to develop active-learning activities—as either in-class activities or homework assignments—for fear of the onslaught of grading resulting from these new activities. However, just because students generate work does not mean instructors need to grade that work for accuracy. In fact, we have presented evidence that accuracy-based grading may, in fact, demotivate students and impede learning. Additionally, the time-consuming process of instructors marking papers and leaving comments may achieve no gain, if comments are rarely read by students. One wonders how much more student learning might occur if instructors’ time spent grading was used in different ways. What if instructors spent more time planning in-class discussions of homework and simply assigned a small number of earned points to students for completing the work? What if students themselves used rubrics to examine their peers’ efforts and evaluate their own work, instead of instructors spending hours and hours commenting on papers? What if students viewed their peers as resources and collaborators, as opposed to competitors in courses that employ grade curving? Implementing small changes like those described above might allow instructors to promote more student learning by grading less or at least differently than they have before.

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10 Grading Tips for Teachers

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One thing you might not be prepared for as a first-year teacher is the significant amount of time you’ll spend grading papers—about 95 minutes a day according to one study. But student grades are critical to giving feedback and helping with student learnings. Given this fact, knowing how to grade exams and essays efficiently can be a real lifesaver for both new and seasoned teachers alike.

If you’re ready to hone your grading skills and save yourself from mountains of paperwork, keep reading for 10 useful tips.

1. Avoid Grading Everything

This may come as a shock to new teachers, but not every assignment that comes across your desk needs to be graded. While some amount of feedback is necessary, some can also be wasteful. Plus, grading everything can take up valuable time that could be better spent doing things like lesson planning.

There will be certain activities that are better to evaluate through a simple spot check or a class discussion or assignments such as journal entries or book reports that can be awarded participation points. Exams should be graded, but a simple math quiz or assignment may be able to be skipped in order to save time.

2. Utilize Different Grading Techniques

The most commonly used grading system in the U.S. is the letter-based grading system—or the grade point average (GPA) system in combination with a letter grade. However, there are other grading techniques that might be a better fit depending on the age, ability, or needs of your students. One grading system might not be fair for all learners, such as those with special needs . It's important to understand your school's grade preferences, and understand that high school, middle school, and elementary school may need to be graded differently. Similarly, public schools and private schools may be graded differently based on preferences.

Here are a few to consider:

• Standards-Based Grading: Unlike traditional grading systems that assign a single overall grade, standards-based grading is broken down into smaller “learning targets,” and grading is based on how well the student demonstrates their mastery of each target. Teachers assign activities such as quizzes, essays, presentations, etc. and then assess the student’s mastery of that activity with a grade of exceeding, meeting, or not meeting the standard. One benefit of this grading technique is that teachers have a more immediate understanding of how well their students are learning the material. With that information, they can adjust their lessons in real time to better meet students’ needs.
• Mastery-Based Education: Just as the name implies a mastery-based approach to grading allows students to move through material as they master it. Instead of a failing grade, struggling students can continue to practice concepts until they’ve grasped them. This system can help level the educational field for students with different needs or learning styles. It gives fast learners the opportunity to quickly advance, while slower learners get the time they need to grasp the material.
• E-S-N-U System: This approach is most commonly used in elementary schools, specifically kindergarten through third grade. With this system, students are assigned a grade of E (excellent), S (satisfactory), N (needs improvement), or U (unsatisfactory). It’s also common in younger classrooms to use acknowledgements—such as hard-working, well-prepared, or well-organized—rather than a letter or number-based grade.
• Weighted Grading: In many high schools , students are given higher numerical grades for more difficult courses. This is commonly referred to as a weighted GPA, and it’s designed to reward students for taking more advanced classes. For example, a student could receive a 4.5 if they earned an A in an honors course.
• Pass-Fail Systems: With this approach students either receive credit for a class or not. Some teachers prefer to use pass-fail grading systems in courses that have highly subjective material (such as fine arts or music). A pass-fail method of grading can shift the focus away from grades and create an environment in which learning is the reward.

Remember; there’s no one-size-fits-all method to grading. It’s important to keep an open mind and be flexible in your grading techniques. Many classrooms can benefit from a grading approach that incorporates multiple types of assignments so students can demonstrate their learning in different ways.

3. Create Grading Rubrics

Rubrics are sets of scoring guidelines that teachers can use to provide consistency in grading a student’s work. Grading rubrics or grading scales are beneficial for both students and teachers. They help teachers avoid repetitive feedback and can be recycled for other assignments, which saves time on grading. Rubrics also let students know the expectations of each project, eliminating any confusion or miscommunication. If you establish a grading scale, grade calculation is also much easier because you know exactly what you are looking for. A gradebook is easy to create when you have a specific rubric in mind.

As you’re developing your rubrics, remember you can tap into other grading alternatives such as pass-fail, curve grading, or grading based on participation.

4. Utilize Your Students

Don’t forget your students can be a part of the grading process, too. Instead of spending hours grading papers on your own, you can take advantage of peer grading to save you time. One way to do this is to have students swap their assignments with a neighbor and mark each other’s work as you go through the answers.

Utilizing self-grading or peer-grading methods is a win-win for teachers and students. It can help improve your students' understanding of the material and sharpen their critical thinking skills—while at the same time taking some of the grading work off your plate. A simple math quiz can easily be graded by the students instead of sitting on your desk.

5. Avoid Assigning Busy Work

As a new teacher, it can be tempting to assign busy work to soak up class time—but it also creates more work for you. Often the curriculum doesn't need busy work to help students learn it. Quality over quantity is key. Make sure the projects are meaningful and worth the time it will take for you to grade it. If the activity doesn’t relate to or strengthen your lesson plans, avoid assigning it.

6. Reduce Distractions

It’s easy to get distracted when we live in a world with social media, push notifications, and text. When you sit down to grade, it’s important to find a quiet environment that let’s you focus and be productive. Things like constant cell phone alerts can be your worst enemy. Make sure to put your phone on silent mode or leave it in another room to reduce distractions. If you’re working on your computer, you can avoid online time sucks by blocking or hiding specific websites or apps.

7. Carve Out Specific Time

Effective time management is key to stay on top of grading. You can avoid mountains of paperwork by carving out specific times for grading—whether it’s during your prep hour or during times of the day when you feel most productive. Block off time on your weekly calendar to serve as a reminder for those times when you need to be grading.

8. Use Technology

If you’re studying to become a teacher , it’s valuable to look into the different kinds of technology solutions that can make grading easier for you. Many teachers can benefit from using the following feedback, input, and tracking apps in their classroom:

• Google Forms or Google Docs are both great for auto-grading or making comments on student work.
• Mote is a Chrome extension that lets teachers add voice comments and feedback to shared files, like Google Docs.
• Formative encourages students to learn from live feedback and corrections, and teachers can watch as students answer questions and jump in to help.
• FreshGrade is an easy way to record, save, and share student learning.
• LearnBoost is a free electronic grading system for teachers.
• GoSoapBox features a web-based clicker to give instant feedback.
• Edulastic is a formative assessment tool that tracks achievement of benchmarks.
• Kaizena saves time by assessing digital work on Google Drive.
• The Answer Pad is a teacher-friendly assessment app for the classroom.
• Kahoot! is a gamified classroom tool that makes assessment fun and competitive.

9. Cycle Feedback

Many new teachers feel obligated to use grades as an opportunity for feedback on every student’s work. While providing thoughtful feedback is a good thing, it’s not necessary for every single assignment. Cycling comments will save you loads of time and allow you to work smarter, not harder. Create a systematic approach to which classes or assignments you spend extra time writing out extensive feedback; then switch it up on the next round of grading.

10. Take Breaks

Instead of trying to power through hours of grading, step away every once and awhile to give your brain a break. This piece of advice might seem counterproductive, but studies show a bit of downtime here and there can actually increase your productivity .

Working for long stretches of time without breaks can lead to stress and exhaustion. To avoid this, make sure to get up and get moving every few hours. According to “Psychology Today,” taking a walk, calling a friend, or simply moving around can replenish your mental resources and allow you to work more efficiently for longer periods.

If you feel like the paperwork is piling up, don’t get discouraged. Have these tips handy so you can get ahead of the work and make your grading process more manageable.

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Articles & Advice > Majors and Academics > Blog

Your Grades Don't Define You, But They Do Matter

Your grades don't define you, but they still matter in high school and for college admission. Here's why you should take your grades seriously and do your best.

by Therese Castro CollegeXpress Student Writer

Last Updated: Mar 16, 2023

Originally Posted: Nov 12, 2015

Your grades don’t define you—but they do still matter in high school, in your college search, and maybe even in your life after college. This is something many students need to hear. Oftentimes, students take grades for granted, thinking a bad grade here or there doesn’t change much for their future. But grades really are important to your future, and if you really care about your future, the grades you get now will inform and change that.

Not caring will make things more stressful

School is stressful. Not everyone gets straight A’s, and the weight of grades sometimes brings us down. In an effort to comfort those who aren't getting the grades they want, the mantra “Your grades don’t define you” has spread around. To be fair, it is true and something you should keep in mind. But many students have warped the meaning of this saying into thinking grades don’t matter at all and you don’t need to try to do well in school. Is this really the kind of mindset we should carry around as students? No, your grades aren’t everything , but not caring or trying will inevitably result in more stress when you start the college admission process and you can’t get in anywhere because you have no reasonable excuse for why your grades aren’t great.

Related: How Are Grades Used in College Admission Decisions?

You don’t need a 4.0, but you should give it your best

Grades  do  matter. There may be flaws in many grading systems—sometimes in the education system itself—but letters and numbers do still hold value. It may be a tough pill to swallow, but you’re only hurting yourself if you pretend your grades don’t matter. Colleges look at grades, scholarship organizations look at grades, and employers look at grades too. However, you should also remember that you don’t need to have a 4.0 to be successful. Grades can’t show every amazing quality you have, and colleges, scholarship organizations, and employers understand that.

Reframe how you look at your grades

You should think of grades more as a measurement of how much you tried. If you’re failing almost every class, there’s a strong chance you aren’t applying yourself and reaching your real potential . To some, straight A’s come naturally, requiring no extra effort. If you’re one of those students, then getting below a B might mean you really didn’t try. If it takes you hours of studying to get B’s, then that’s okay too. As long as you truly tried to the best of your ability, you can look at a C and be okay. If you know you can do better than a C, then try harder next time, do something different when you study, use a different test-taking strategy, or even ask for some extra credit. Everyone is capable of improving in school—it just takes time. Remember that you should never beat yourself up over a low grade—as long as you actually tried.

Related: 6 Smart Tips for Dealing With a Bad Grade

Grades don’t define you. Those numbers on your transcripts aren’t labels on your forehead. You are so much more. However, good grades are important because they give people an idea of your academic strengths, interests, and ability to learn new things. Grades aren’t so important that you should pull all-nighters until you collapse; they key is finding a healthy balance between giving your schoolwork the attention it deserves and giving yourself the mental health break you deserve.

Improve your work ethic and your grades by checking out more advice like this in our Majors and Academics  section.

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About Therese Castro

Therese is a high school student from Texas who loves writing—all kinds of writing—more than anything. She believes that opinions and advice should be shared and that important social topics should be talked about.

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How to Grade Essays with ChatGPT

Introduction.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has opened exciting possibilities in essay grading. With its advanced natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT offers a new dimension in assessing written work, potentially revolutionizing the grading process for educators and researchers. Let’s delve into how ChatGPT could potentially make essay grading easier, more efficient, and more accurate.

ChatGPT can analyze written content for various parameters, including content quality, argument structure, coherence, and adherence to guidelines. Whether you use a continuous scoring system (e.g., quality of writing) or a discrete one (e.g., essay positions), ChatGPT can be tailored to your specific needs, offering customized feedback for different writing styles and assignments. Literature also suggests that LLMs can significantly increase grading efficiency, alleviating some of the burden on educators (Abedi et al., 2023; Okonkwo & Ade-Ibijola, 2021; Richter et al., 2019). Imagine grading hundreds of essays and providing feedback on them – a time-consuming and tiring task. ChatGPT can automate the initial assessment, flagging essays that require further attention based on specific criteria. Additionally, ChatGPT can identify stylistic strengths and weaknesses, analyze the use of literary devices, and even point out potential inconsistencies in an argument’s logic. This could free up valuable educator time for student interaction and curriculum development.

However, caution against over-reliance on this new technology is adivsed in scenarios where biased or inaccurate models could unfairly impact individual students. It is essential to recognize both the potential advantages and limitations of LLMs. This blog post aims to delve into and reflect on ChatGPT’s capabilities for grading and classifying essays and to provide insights into the practical application of using ChatGPT in educational settings.

In this blog, we will explore:

• Essay grading with ChatGPT and ChatGPT API
• Steps for essay grading with ChatGPT API
• Steps for essay classification with ChatGPT API
• Cost & computation times

For steps 2 and 3, we will provide detailed instructions on how to access and set up the ChatGPT API, prepare and upload your text dataset, and efficiently grade or classify numerous essays. Additionally, we will compare the outcomes of human grading to those obtained through GPT grading.

## Essay Grading with ChatGPT and ChatGPT API

For a single essay, we can simply ask ChatGPT to grade as follows:

For multiple essays, we could request ChatGPT to grade each one individually. However, when dealing with a large number of essays (e.g., 50, 100, 1000, etc.), manually grading them in this way becomes a laborious and time-consuming task. In such cases, we can leverage the ChatGPT API service to evaluate numerous essays at once, providing greater flexibility and efficiency. ChatGPT API is a versatile tool that enables developers to integrate ChatGPT into their own applications, services, or websites. When you use the API, you also gain more control over the interaction, such as the ability to adjust temperature, maximum tokens, and the presence of system messages.

It is important to understand the distinctions between ChatGPT’s web interface and the pretrained models accessible through the OpenAI API .

ChatGPT’s web version provides a user-friendly chat interface, requiring no coding knowledge and offering features like integrated system tools. However, it is less customizable and is not designed for managing high volumes of requests. Additionally, due to its internal short-term memory span, previous conversations can influence later responses. In contrast, the OpenAI API offers pretrained models without a built-in interface, necessitating coding experience for integration. These models excel at managing large request volumes, but lack ChatGPT’s conversational memory; they process each input independently. This fundamental difference can lead to variations in the outputs generated by ChatGPT’s web interface and the OpenAI API.

Here’s an example of grading a single essay using the ChatAPI with Python:

Interestingly, this example produces a single score rather than the sentence generated above via the ChatGPT web interface. This difference could be attributed to the ChatGPT API interpreting the prompt more directly than the ChatGPT online service, even though they both use the same pretrained model. Alternatively, the variability in ChatGPT’s results might be due to inherent randomness in its responses.

By implementing a loop with multiple texts, we can acquire scores for an entire set of essays. Let’s see how to do that.

Steps for Essay Grading with ChatGPT API

Get and set up a chatgpt api key.

We assume that you have already installed the Python OpenAI library on your system and have an active OpenAI account. Setting up and obtaining access to the ChatGPT API involves the following steps:

Obtain an OpenAI key: Vist the OpenAI API website at https://platform.openai.com/api-keys and click +Create a new secret key button. Save your key securely, as you cannot regenerate the same code due to OpenAI’s security policies.

Set ip API key: In your Python script or notebook, set up the API key using the following code, replacing “YOUR-API-KEY” with your actual API key:

Load the text dataset

In this post, we will grade a series of essays about the iPad usage in schools

Score the multiple essays

Grading 50 essays takes only 25 seconds.

Compare human grading scores with GPT grading scores

For these data, we happend to have scores given by human raters as well, allowing us how similar the human scores are to the scores generated by ChatGPT.

Using the code provided in the accompanying script, we get the following:

A contigency table (confusion matrix) of the scores is:

The averages and standard deviations of human grading and GPT grading scores are 2.54 ( SD = 1.68) and 2.34 ( SD = 0.74), respectively. The correlation between them is 0.62, indicating a fairly strong positive linear relationship. Additionally, the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is 1.36, providing a measure of the GPT’s prediction accuracy compared to the actual human grading scores.

Steps for Essay Classification with ChatGPT API

ChatGPT can be utilized not only for scoring essays but also for classifying essays based on some categorical variable such as writers’ opinions regarding iPad usage in schools. Here are the steps to guide you through the process, assuming you already have access to the ChatGPT API and have loaded your text dataset:

Classify multiple essays

Classifying 50 essays takes only 27 seconds.

We create a new column re_Stance_iPad based on the mapping of values from the existing Stance_iPad column. Except for AFF and NEG opinions, opinions on AMB, BAL, and NAR are unclear. Therefore, AMB, BAL, and NAR are combined as OTHER.

Compare human classification with GPT classification

ChatGPT achieves an accuracy of approximately 84%, demonstrating its correctness in classification. An F1 score of 0.84, reflecting the harmonic mean of precision and recall, signifies a well-balanced performance in terms of both precision and recall. Additionally, the Cohen’s Kappa value of 0.71, which measures the agreement between predicted and actual classifications while accounting for chance, indicates substantial agreement beyond what would be expected by chance alone.

Cost & Computation times

How long does it take to assess all essays.

Grading and classifying 50 essays each took 25 and 27 seconds , resulting in a rate of about 2 essays per second.

What is the cost of assessing all essays?

In this blog, we utilized GPT-3.5-turbo-0125. According to OpenAI’s pricing page , the cost for input processing is $0.0005 per 1,000 tokens, and for output, it is $0.0015 per 1,000 tokens, indicating that the ChatGPT API charges for both tokens sent out and tokens received.

The total expenditure for grading all essays —50 assessing essay quality and 50 for essay classification—was approximately $0.01 .

What are tokens and how to count them?

Tokens can be viewed as fragments of words. When the API receives prompts, it breaks down the input into tokens. These divisions do not always align with the beginning or end of words; tokens may include spaces and even parts of words. To grasp the concept of tokens and their length equivalencies better, here are some helpful rules of thumb:

• 1 token ≈ 4 characters in English.
• 1 token ≈ ¾ of a word.
• 100 tokens ≈ 75 words.
• 1 to 2 sentences ≈ 30 tokens.
• 1 paragraph ≈ 100 tokens.
• 1,500 words ≈ 2,048 tokens.

To get additional context on how tokens are counted, consider this:

The prompt at the beginning of this blog, requesting that OpenAI grade an essay, contains 129 tokens, and the output contains 12 tokens.

The input cost is $0.0000645, and the output cost is $0.000018.

ChatGPT provides an alternative approach to essay grading. This post has delved into the practical application of ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities, demonstrating how it can be used for efficient and accurate essay grading, with a comparison to human grading. The flexibility of ChatGPT is particularly evident when handling large volumes of essays, making it a viable alternative tool for educators and researchers. By employing the ChatGPT API key service, the grading process becomes not only streamlined but also adaptable to varying scales, from individual essays to hundreds or even thousands.

This technology has the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency of the grading process. By automating the assessment of written work, teachers and researchers can devote more time to other critical aspects of education. However, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of current LLMs in this context. While they can assist in grading, relying solely on LLMs for final grades could be problematic, especially if LLMs are biased or inaccurate. Such scenarios could lead to unfair outcomes for individual students, highlighting the need for human oversight in the grading process. For large scale research, where we look at always across many essays, this is less of a concern (see e.g., Mozer et al., 2023)

The guide in this blog has provided a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up and accessing the ChatGPT API essay grading.

We also explored the reliability of ChatGPT’s grading, as compared to human grading. The moderate positive correlation of 0.62 attests to same consistency between human grading and ChatGPT’s evaluations. The classification results reveal that the model achieves an accuracy of approximately 84%, and the Cohen’s Kappa value of 0.71 indicates substantial agreement beyond what would be expected by chance alone. See the related study (Kim et al., 2024) for more on this.

In essence, this comprehensive guide underscores the transformative potential of ChatGPT in essay grading, presenting it as a valuable approach in the ever-evolving educational fields. This post gives an overview; we next dig in a bit more, thinking about prompt engineering + providing examples to improve accuracy.

Writer’s Comments

The api experience: a blend of ease and challenge.

Starting your journey with the ChatGPT API will be surprisingly smooth, especially if you have some Python experience. Copying and pasting code from this blog, followed by acquiring your own ChatGPT API and tweaking prompts and datasets, might seem like a breeze. However, this simplicity masks the underlying complexity. Bumps along the road are inevitable, reminding us that “mostly” easy does not mean entirely challenge-free.

The biggest hurdle you will likely face is mastering the art of crafting effective prompts. While ChatGPT’s responses are impressive, they can also be unpredictably variable. Conducting multiple pilot runs with 5-10 essays is crucial. Experimenting with diverse prompts on the same essays can act as a stepping stone, refining your approach and building confidence for wider application.

When things click, the benefits are undeniable. Automating the grading process with ChatGPT can save considerable time. Human graders, myself included, can struggle with maintaining consistent standards across a mountain of essays. ChatGPT, on the other hand, might be more stable when grading large batches in a row.

It is crucial to acknowledge that this method is not a magic bullet. Continuous scoring is not quite there yet, and limitations still exist. But the good news is that LLMs like ChatGPT are constantly improving, and new options are emerging.

Overall Reflections: A Journey of Discovery

The exploration of the ChatGPT API can be a blend of innovation, learning, and the occasional frustration. While AI grading systems like ChatGPT are not perfect, their ability to save time and provide consistent grading scheme makes them an intriguing addition to the educational toolkit. As we explore and refine these tools, the horizon for their application in educational settings seems ever-expanding, offering a glimpse into a future where AI and human educators work together to enhance the learning experience. Who knows, maybe AI will become a valuable partner in the grading process in the future!

Call to Action

Have you experimented with using ChatGPT for grading? Share your experiences and questions in the comments below! We can all learn from each other as we explore the potential of AI in education.

• Abedi, M., Alshybani, I., Shahadat, M. R. B., & Murillo, M. (2023). Beyond Traditional Teaching: The Potential of Large Language Models and Chatbots in Graduate Engineering Education. Qeios. https://doi.org/10.32388/MD04B0
• Kim, Y., Mozer, R., Miratrix, L., & Al-Ademi, S. (2024). ChatGPT vs. Machine Learning: Assessing the Efficacy and Accuracy of Large Language Models for Automated Essay Scoring (in preparation).
• Okonkwo, C. W., & Ade-Ibijola, A. (2021). Chatbots applications in education: A systematic review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2, 100033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeai.2021.100033
• Pricing . (n.d.). OpenAI. Retrieved March 2, 2024, from https://openai.com/pricing#language-models
• Mozer, R., Miratrix, L., Relyea, J. E., & Kim, J. S. (2023). Combining Human and Automated Scoring Methods in Experimental Assessments of Writing: A Case Study Tutorial. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 10769986231207886. https://doi.org/10.3102/10769986231207886
• Zawacki-Richter, O., Marín, V. I., Bond, M., & Gouverneur, F. (2019). Systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education–where are the educators?. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 16(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0171-0

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A New Book Argues Grades Are Failing Students. Here’s Why

Joshua R. Eyler gives the U.S. grading system an “F” in his new book, "Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, And What We Can Do About It."

Joshua R. Eyler gives the U.S. grading system an “F” in his new book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, And What We Can Do About It . In it, which publishes on August 27, Eyler makes the case that grades hurt academic success and are helping to fuel the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

Eyler is director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning and an education professor at the University of Mississippi. I recently spoke with him about how he came to these conclusions and the alternative grading systems he’s studied that thousands of schools are already using.

Is It True Grades Aren’t Linked To Academic Success?

One of the main arguments in favor of grading is that it inspires students to do work, and without it, students wouldn’t have any motivation.

The research doesn’t really support this claim, Eyler says. In his book, he points to a 2021 meta-analysis of many previous studies looking at the impact of grading overall . The study compared three groups of students, one who received grades, a second group that received feedback but no grades, and a third group that received no grades or feedback. The study’s authors note: “Overall results indicated that grades positively influenced achievement but negatively influenced motivation compared to no feedback.”

Perhaps more significantly, students who received comments without grades saw increased achievement and motivation. “Compared to those who received comments, students receiving grades had poorer achievement and less optimal motivation,” the study’s authors conclude.

And this research is not an outlier. “That work really confirms research that has been around for decades showing the [negative] effect of grades on performance learning and motivation,” Eyler says. “It’s a continuous thread that we see through these investigations.”

Why Do Grades Seem To Decrease Achievement?

Education scientists often talk about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Grades, most agree, are extrinsic motivators. “They're the prize, the candy, the reward that students get for following the rules and moving through the system,” Eyler says. “What we know about extrinsic motivators is that they are good for compliance. They work to get people to do things that they don't want to do. And so, yes, they can work to get students in seats, to get them to turn things in on time, to get them to participate.”

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However, there’s a catch. “An extrinsic motivator can never guarantee that someone will learn just because they're forced to be in a classroom,” Eyler says. “Learning depends on intrinsic motivation which grades affect pretty negatively.”

Additionally, grades can often interfere with fundamental patterns of learning. “The natural way that we learn something from a scientific perspective is we try things out. We make a mistake. We get feedback on that, and then we try it again,” Eyler says. “This is a cycle that our brains are really built to go through as we learn new things and grades arrest that process before it can ever take place. So we get to the trying things out part, and then we get a stamp of how well we tried them out without the opportunity to benefit from the feedback and the trying again.”

Beyond academics, grades are consistently linked to stress and negative mental health in students, Eyler says.

But Isn't Doing Away With Grades Impossible?

Grades seem so engrained in our education system that even talking about a school without grades feels radical. But there are many that exist. More than 3,000 Montessori schools, including 500 public schools, are gradeless. Beyond these, many K-12 districts and colleges across the U.S. have embraced nontraditional grading systems, Eyler says.

“There are definitely some great models and examples of schools that don't have any grades, both at the K-12 and college level,” Eyler says. But he’s not advocating schools across the country pump the breaks on all grading. “I think a lot of this conversation is really trying to get from the traditional grading schemes that we're in now to reorienting students' relationship with grades by trying out some of the alternative grading models that people are using.”

Many school districts are moving toward standards-based grading, which is also referred to as competency or proficiency mastery grading. Other grading methods include portfolio grading, collaborative grading, and specifications grading.

“There’s lots of different ways people are experimenting with the kinds of evaluation that they’re using to release the pressure valve and put the emphasis back onto learning and less about the grade itself,” Eyler says.

What Role Can Technology Play In This Conversation?

Technology isn’t needed to move from traditional grading to another grading method but it can make it easier by allowing teachers to create multiple opportunities for success through their LMS or other tools.

Elyer points to a colleague at the University of Mississippi who offers an unlimited retake system on chemistry classes. To do this the professor created a vast dataset of questions. “She has all the possible problems in the LMS and it generates new exams kind of randomly pulling from that databank. So it saves time. It helps to automate the process,” he says.

Additionally, new software is being developed to translate mastery-grade transcripts into their traditional grade equivalents. Eyler says these later tools may be helpful but aren’t necessary because colleges can already evaluate non-traditional transcripts.

What Are The Biggest Grading Misconceptions?

Many proponents of traditional grades say that without grades there is no way to tell if students have learned, but that’s not true, Eyler says. “There's nothing inherent to a grade that is intrinsically connected to whether or not a student is learning something. We can give students that information through written or oral feedback just as easily as we can, in fact, better than we can, just by putting a 92 or a B- on something.”

He adds this idea is tied to another common misconception that grades are necessary to maintain rigor and academic standards. “That's not true, either, for many of the same reasons,” he says.

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Erik Ofgang is a Tech & Learning contributor. A journalist,  author  and educator, his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and Associated Press. He currently teaches at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. While a staff writer at Connecticut Magazine he won a Society of Professional Journalism Award for his education reporting. He is interested in how humans learn and how technology can make that more effective. 

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2022 Grade 10 Maths Second Term Paper | Sinhala Medium – Minuwangoda Education Zone

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GCSE AQA English Literature - A Christmas Carol, (full marks) Grade 9 example essays

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

24 August 2024

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3 example essays for GCSE AQA English Literature - A Christmas Carol. The example essays are on: poverty, social responsibility and redemption. These essays are only for example purposes - for you to be able to look and see the type of style and content necessary for a grade 9, and are not intended for people to copy into their exams, for which I am not to be held accountable. For authenticity purposes, I have achieved a grade 9 and full marks in all of my GCSE English Literature examinations 2022, and all 3 of these essays were written by me for practise (not used in my final exam!!). I am not to be held accountable for any small errors.

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