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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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How to Grade a Paper

Last Updated: July 29, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Noah Taxis . Noah Taxis is an English Teacher based in San Francisco, California. He has taught as a credentialed teacher for over four years: first at Mountain View High School as a 9th- and 11th-grade English Teacher, then at UISA (Ukiah Independent Study Academy) as a Middle School Independent Study Teacher. He is now a high school English teacher at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco. He received an MA in Secondary Education and Teaching from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He also received an MA in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a BA in International Literary & Visual Studies and English from Tufts University. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 87,485 times.

Anyone can mark answers right and wrong, but a great teacher can mark up a paper in such a way as to encourage a student who needs it and let good students know they can do better. As the great poet and teacher Taylor Mali put it: "I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor and I can make an A- feel like a slap in the face."

Going Through an Essay

• These designations obviously depend upon many things, like the assignment, the grade-level of your students, and their individual concerns. If you're in the middle of a unit on comma usage, it's perfectly fine to call that a "higher" concern. But in general, a basic writing assignment should prioritize the higher concerns listed above.

• Does the student address the prompt and fulfill the assignment effectively?
• Does the student think creatively?
• Does the student clearly state their argument, or thesis?
• Is the thesis developed over the course of the assignment?
• Does the writer provide evidence?
• Does the paper show evidence of organization and revision, or does it seem like a first draft?

• Marking essays in pencil can suggest that the issues are easily fixable, keeping the student looking forward, rather than dwelling on their success or failure. Pencil, blue, or black pen is perfectly appropriate.

• Be as specific as possible when asking questions. "What?" is not a particularly helpful question to scrawl in the margin, compared to "What do you mean by 'some societies'?"

• ¶ = to start a new paragraph
• three underscores under a letter = to lowercase or uppercase the letter
• "sp" = word is spelled incorrectly
• word crossed out with a small "pigtail" above = word needs to be deleted
• Some teachers use the first page as a rule of thumb for marking later concerns. If there are sentence-level issues, mark them on the first page and then stop marking them throughout the essay, especially if the assignment needs more revision.

Writing Effective Comments

• Use marginal comments to point out specific points or areas in the essay the student could improve.
• Use a paragraph note at the end to summarize your comments and direct them toward improvement.
• Comments should not justify a letter grade. Never start a note, "You got a C because...". It's not your job to defend the grade given. Instead, use the comments to look toward revision and the next assignment, rather than staring backward at the successes or failures of the given assignment.

• If you struggle to find anything, you can always praise their topic selection: "This is an important topic! Good choice!"

• When you give your first read-through, Try to determine what these three points might be to make it easier when you're going through the paper and writing comments.

• "In your next assignment, make sure to organize your paragraphs according to the argument you're making" is a better comment than "Your paragraphs are disorganized."

Assigning Letter Grades

• Thesis and argument: _/40
• Organization and paragraphs: _/30
• Introduction and conclusion: _/10
• Grammar, usage, and spelling: _/10
• Sources and Citations: _/10

• A (100-90): Work completes all of the requirements of the assignment in an original and creative manner. Work at this level goes beyond the basic guidelines of the assignment, showing the student took extra initiative in originally and creatively forming content, organization, and style.
• B (89-80): Work completes all of the requirements of the assignment. Work at this level is successful in terms of content, but might need some improvement in organization and style, perhaps requiring a little revision. A B reveals less of the author’s original thought and creativity than A-level work.
• C (79-70): Work completes most of the requirements of the assignment. Though the content, organization, and style are logical and coherent, they may require some revision and may not reflect a high level of originality and creativity on the part of the author.
• D (69-60): Work either does not complete the requirements of the assignment, or meets them quite inadequately. Work at this level requires a good deal of revision, and is largely unsuccessful in content, organization, and style.
• F (Below 60): Work does not complete the requirements of the assignment. In general, students who put forth genuine effort will not receive an F. If you receive an F on any assignment (particularly if you feel you have given adequate effort), you should speak with me personally.

• Some teachers like to hand out papers at the end of the day because they fear discouraging or distracting students during class time. Consider giving the students time to go through the papers in class and be available to talk about their grades afterwards. This will ensure that they read and understand your comments.

Expert Q&A

• Avoid distractions. It can seem like a good idea to grade papers while you watch Jeopardy, but it'll end up taking longer. Set a manageable goal, like grading ten papers tonight, and quit when you've finished and have a drink. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Do not keep favorites. Grade everyone equally. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Look for more than just grammar. Look for concepts, plots, climax and most importantly...make sure it has a beginning (introduction that catches your attention), a middle (three reasons should have three supportive details to each) and an end(recapture what the paper was about, make a good ending to let the audience remember your story). Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Always use a rubric to keep yourself safe from grade appeals. You don't want to have to defend subjective grades. Thanks Helpful 12 Not Helpful 4

Things You'll Need

• Something to write with
• A stack of papers
• A stiff beverage

You Might Also Like

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about grading papers, check out our in-depth interview with Noah Taxis .

• ↑ https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/grading.html
• ↑ https://depts.washington.edu/pswrite/Handouts/Grading.pdf
• ↑ https://phys.org/news/2013-01-red-pen-instructors-negative-response.html
• ↑ https://gsi.berkeley.edu/gsi-guide-contents/student-writing-intro/grading/
• ↑ https://sites.google.com/a/georgetown.edu/prof-william-blattner/resources-for-students/abbreviations-on-returned-papers
• ↑ https://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/teaching/first-year-writing-pedagogies-methods-design/diagnosing-and-responding-student-writing
• ↑ http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/criteria.pdf
• ↑ https://teaching.uwo.ca/teaching/assessing/grading-rubrics.html

About This Article

To grade a paper, start by reading it without marking it up to see if it has a clear thesis supported by solid evidence. Then, go back through and write comments, criticism, and questions in the margins. Make sure to give specific feedback, such as “What do you mean by ‘some societies’?” instead of something like “What?” Try to limit yourself to 1 comment per paragraph so you don’t overwhelm the student. You can also write a note at the end, but start with praise before focusing on issues the student should address. For information on how to assign grades to your students’ papers, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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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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• 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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• Online Guide to Writing

How Is Writing Graded?

Students often want to know how their writing assignments are graded—that is, what is an A paper, a B paper, and so on. Generally speaking, there are two basic ways to determine how your papers will be graded.

Understand your assignment, which often will include a rubric.

Understand general grading standards professors usually apply to papers.

Assignments and What Rubrics Have To Do with Them 

Virtually every college and graduate-level assignment will include instructions from your professor. Often, rubrics, which provide criteria for each possible grade you might receive, will accompany your assignments. 

Some rubrics can be quite detailed, breaking down the assignment and describing the grading criteria for each requirement. Other rubrics merely provide general writing standards associated with each grade. In either case, your first and best source for understanding assignment’s associated grading standards is the content of the assignment itself.

As you familiarize yourself with an assignment and its rubric, keep in mind the following:

Prioritize the criteria for a particular assignment over the criteria listed in the section below. 

When an assignment comes with a rubric, study the rubric and familiarize yourself with it. Aside from your professor, this is the best guide to successfully meeting the assignment requirements.

Prioritize your professor’s advice above all. College and graduate professors often provide their own descriptions of their assignments and a list of requirements. Sometimes these can differ from the accompanying rubric. If you are ever in doubt about your assignment and its requirements, contact your professor with your questions. 

Some General (Though Not Exhaustive) Grading Standards for Academic Papers

Although each professor and class is unique, there are some general qualities that attach to each grade. The following grading standards may be useful as you assess your own writing, but remember, a number of factors ultimately contribute to your grade, including your specific instructor's guidelines and preferences. Always defer to your assignment-specific or class-specific standards for grading information, and reach out to your instructor with any questions.

• The Grade of A
• The Grade of B
• The Grade of C
• The Grade of D
• The Grade of F

The A paper is characterized by outstanding writing marked by superior readability and command of content.

The paper thoroughly addresses the assignment prompt. 

The paper proceeds in a clear, logical fashion that makes the information accessible to the reader. 

The paper’s purpose is clear, followed by details reflecting this purpose.  

The style throughout the paper accommodates the reader. 

The diction throughout the paper, and sentence construction, contribute to understanding. 

The student’s grammar, mechanics, and format are flawless.

The B paper is characterized by distinguished writing and fulfills the assignment requirements; however, the writing contains some of the following weaknesses:

The paper is well organized, but the presentation of content sometimes inhibits understanding.

The audience for which the paper is intended is sometimes unclear.

The student’s diction at times is vague and hinders precise communication. 

The student’s grammar, mechanics, and formatting flaws interfere with reading and comprehension.

The C paper is characterized by satisfactory writing that is generally effective but contains any one of the following weaknesses:

The paper lacks clear organization, or some material is not clearly explained; the paper’s audience and purpose are not clear.

The student’s sentences, although grammatically correct, often make information difficult to extract.

The student’s diction throughout the paper interferes with readability, but the reader can still glean the meaning; sections of the paper require rereading. 

The paper contains repeated errors in grammar, mechanics, or format.

The D paper struggles to communicate information and contains weak writing. In a professional work environment, such writing would be considered incompetent because it suffers from any one of the following problems:

The paper contains two or more of the problems listed for the C paper.

The paper lacks evidence of audience accommodation.

The paper contains poor diction, such as garbled wording that prevents understanding. 

The student’s sentences have mechanical errors, such as persistent run‑on sentences and comma splices.

The student’s grammar, spelling, or format problems create frequent obstacles to understanding.

The paper fails on multiple levels. A failing grade on a writing assignment usually means that your paper contains two or more of the problems listed for the D paper.

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Table of Contents: Online Guide to Writing

Chapter 1: College Writing

How Does College Writing Differ from Workplace Writing?

What Is College Writing?

Why So Much Emphasis on Writing?

Chapter 2: The Writing Process

Doing Exploratory Research

Getting from Notes to Your Draft

Introduction

Prewriting - Techniques to Get Started - Mining Your Intuition

Prewriting: Targeting Your Audience

Prewriting: Techniques to Get Started

Prewriting: Understanding Your Assignment

Rewriting: Being Your Own Critic

Rewriting: Creating a Revision Strategy

Rewriting: Getting Feedback

Rewriting: The Final Draft

Techniques to Get Started - Outlining

Techniques to Get Started - Using Systematic Techniques

Thesis Statement and Controlling Idea

Writing: Getting from Notes to Your Draft - Freewriting

Writing: Getting from Notes to Your Draft - Summarizing Your Ideas

Writing: Outlining What You Will Write

Chapter 3: Thinking Strategies

A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone

A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone: Style Through Vocabulary and Diction

Critical Strategies and Writing

Critical Strategies and Writing: Analysis

Critical Strategies and Writing: Evaluation

Critical Strategies and Writing: Persuasion

Critical Strategies and Writing: Synthesis

Developing a Paper Using Strategies

Kinds of Assignments You Will Write

Patterns for Presenting Information

Patterns for Presenting Information: Critiques

Patterns for Presenting Information: Discussing Raw Data

Patterns for Presenting Information: General-to-Specific Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Problem-Cause-Solution Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Specific-to-General Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Summaries and Abstracts

Supporting with Research and Examples

Writing Essay Examinations

Writing Essay Examinations: Make Your Answer Relevant and Complete

Writing Essay Examinations: Organize Thinking Before Writing

Writing Essay Examinations: Read and Understand the Question

Chapter 4: The Research Process

Planning and Writing a Research Paper

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Ask a Research Question

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Cite Sources

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Collect Evidence

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Decide Your Point of View, or Role, for Your Research

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Draw Conclusions

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Find a Topic and Get an Overview

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Manage Your Resources

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Outline

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Survey the Literature

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Work Your Sources into Your Research Writing

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Human Resources

Research Resources: What Are Research Resources?

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found?

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Electronic Resources

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Print Resources

Structuring the Research Paper: Formal Research Structure

Structuring the Research Paper: Informal Research Structure

The Nature of Research

The Research Assignment: How Should Research Sources Be Evaluated?

The Research Assignment: When Is Research Needed?

The Research Assignment: Why Perform Research?

Chapter 5: Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity

Giving Credit to Sources

Giving Credit to Sources: Copyright Laws

Giving Credit to Sources: Documentation

Giving Credit to Sources: Style Guides

Integrating Sources

Practicing Academic Integrity

Practicing Academic Integrity: Keeping Accurate Records

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Paraphrasing Your Source

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Quoting Your Source

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Summarizing Your Sources

Types of Documentation

Types of Documentation: Bibliographies and Source Lists

Types of Documentation: Citing World Wide Web Sources

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - APA Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - CSE/CBE Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - Chicago Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - MLA Style

Types of Documentation: Note Citations

Chapter 6: Using Library Resources

Finding Library Resources

Chapter 7: Assessing Your Writing

How Is Writing Graded?: A General Assessment Tool

The Draft Stage

The Draft Stage: The First Draft

The Draft Stage: The Revision Process and the Final Draft

The Draft Stage: Using Feedback

The Research Stage

Using Assessment to Improve Your Writing

Chapter 8: Other Frequently Assigned Papers

Reviews and Reaction Papers: Article and Book Reviews

Reviews and Reaction Papers: Reaction Papers

Writing Arguments

Writing Arguments: Adapting the Argument Structure

Writing Arguments: Purposes of Argument

Writing Arguments: References to Consult for Writing Arguments

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Anticipate Active Opposition

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Determine Your Organization

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Develop Your Argument

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Introduce Your Argument

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - State Your Thesis or Proposition

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Write Your Conclusion

Writing Arguments: Types of Argument

Appendix A: Books to Help Improve Your Writing

Dictionaries

General Style Manuals

Researching on the Internet

Special Style Manuals

Writing Handbooks

Appendix B: Collaborative Writing and Peer Reviewing

Collaborative Writing: Assignments to Accompany the Group Project

Collaborative Writing: Informal Progress Report

Collaborative Writing: Issues to Resolve

Collaborative Writing: Methodology

Collaborative Writing: Peer Evaluation

Collaborative Writing: Tasks of Collaborative Writing Group Members

Collaborative Writing: Writing Plan

General Introduction

Peer Reviewing

Appendix C: Developing an Improvement Plan

Working with Your Instructor’s Comments and Grades

Appendix D: Writing Plan and Project Schedule

Devising a Writing Project Plan and Schedule

Reviewing Your Plan with Others

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• Basics for GSIs
• Advancing Your Skills

Grading Student Work

At its core, grading is a means of communication to provide formative feedback to students. Effective grading requires an understanding of how grading may function as a tool for learning, an acceptance that some grades will be based on subjective criteria, and a willingness to listen to and communicate with students. It is important to help students to focus on the learning process rather than on “getting the grade,” while at the same time acknowledging the importance that grades hold for students. And since GSIs are students themselves, it’s important to balance the requirements of effective grading with other workload and professional commitments.

Grading often challenges instructors. We want to be sure we are evaluating student work fairly, in the sense that our judgment is not subjective or inconsistent. Students deserve fairness and GSIs work hard to deliver it. The desire to give every student’s work careful consideration – as well as knowing the great importance that students often place on grades – can be stressful and sometimes add many extra hours of work for the instructor. However, as we will show in this section, it is possible to provide fair, formative feedback and grades to students while at the same time also protecting your own labor as a GSI.

To begin, it helps to consider grading as a process rather than just the assignment of number or letter grades to student work. As a process, grading may involve some or all of these activities:

• Setting expectations with students through a grading policy
• Designing assignments and exams that promote the course objectives
• Establishing standards and criteria
• Calibrating the application of a grading standard for consistency and fairness
• Making decisions about effort and improvement
• Deciding which comments would be the most useful in guiding each student’s learning
• Returning assignments and helping students understand their grades

Throughout these sections, you will find specific suggestions about designing assignments, setting standards and policies, using grading rubrics, and writing comments on student work.

You might also find relevant information in other sections of this online guide, for example, Working with Student Writing  (for working with student essays), Academic Misconduct  (for addressing cheating and plagiarism), and Evaluating and Improving Your Teaching  (for assessing and learning from your efforts).

In This Section

Before You Grade

• Grading Policies
• Taxonomy of Learning Objectives: Explain What You Want Your Students to Do (pdf)
• Statement of Grading Criteria

Grading Rubrics

• Steps in the Process
• Examples of Rubric Creation
• Rubric Worksheet for an Essay (doc)
• Generic Essay Rubric (pdf)

Tips on Grading Efficiently

Calculating Grades

Communicating with Students

• Writing Comments on Student Work
• Practice Commenting on Sample Papers
• Returning Student Work
• Helping Students Understand Their Grades

Grading: Additional Resources

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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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What are rubrics and how do they affect student learning?

Rubrics are scoring criteria for grading or marking student assessment. When shared before assessment, rubrics communicate to students how they will be evaluated and how they should demonstrate their knowledge and to understand their own score. As pedagogy continues to transform, It’s important to consider the history of rubrics as a context for this pedagogical moment.

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Rubrics are guidelines for student assessments, often used as scoring criteria for grading and marking student work. They are best made clear to students before an assessment; effective rubrics give students transparency into how they will be evaluated, how they should demonstrate their knowledge, what to expect on tests and assignments, and provide next steps in learning.

Rubrics also clarify any marking or grading outcomes, helping students understand why they received their particular score or grade. A good rubric promotes student learning .

In sum, rubrics make clear what counts, what defines excellent work, and uphold grading consistency so that students can succeed and learn in alignment with course expectations; they define the performance instead of judging. Rubrics, just like assessments, are best when designed to connect to learning and outcomes.

Notable pedagogist, Thomas R. Guskey, states , “Interest in rubrics surged during the 1990s as educators turned their focus to documenting student achievement of specific learning standards . Today, rubrics for describing and assessing student performance can be found at every level of education, from preschool and kindergarten to graduate and professional school.”

The history of rubrics follows the proliferation of compulsory education and learning standards. An increasing emphasis on formative assessment has further encouraged the adoption of rubrics within secondary and higher education classrooms, both in North America and East Asia ( Ragupathi & Lee, 2020 ).

Rubrics set evaluation standards that can promote fair grading practices, even across a teaching team. In the case of standardized exams, they uphold consistent marking across an even wider swath of students and graders. They are “multidimensional sets of scoring guidelines that can be used to provide consistency in evaluating student work. They spell out scoring criteria so that multiple teachers, using the same rubric for a student's essay, for example, would arrive at the same score or grade” ( Edutopia, 2018 ).

Furthermore, when students understand rubrics ahead of assessment, they understand how they will be evaluated.

In sum, effective rubrics can:

• Measure higher-order skills or evaluate complex tasks
• Clarify learning goals
• Align students to your expectations
• Foster self-learning and self-improvement in students
• Aid students in self-assessment
• Inspire better student performance
• Improve feedback to students
• Result in faster and easier scoring of assessments
• Enable more accurate, unbiased, and consistent scoring
• Reduce regrading requests from students
• Provide feedback to faculty and staff ( Suskie, 2009 , Wolf & Stevens, 2007 ).

What do effective rubrics look like? They’re more than just a checklist, but rather guidelines that focus on skills that demonstrate learning.

According to Susan M. Brookhart , there are two essential components of effective rubrics:

• Criteria that relates to the learning (and not “the tasks” )
• Performance level descriptions against a continuum of quality.

Researchers recommend two or more performance criteria with distinct, clear, and meaningful labels ( Brookhart, 2018 ) along with 3-5 quality or performance levels ( Popham, 2000 ; Suskie, 2009 ).

An example of five performance levels might look like this:

• Far Below Expectations
• Below Expectations
• Meets Expectations
• Exceeds Expectations
• Demonstrates Excellence

Criteria should center around learning, not tasks. “Appropriate criteria,” according to Brookhart’ s 2018 research , “are the key to effective rubrics. Trivial or surface-level criteria will not draw learning goals for students as clearly as substantive criteria. Students will try to produce what is expected of them.”

For example, examples of criteria might look like the following:

• The thesis sentence is present with strong analytical components and supported by the rest of the essay
• The thesis sentence is present with analytical components and supported by the rest of the essay
• Thesis sentence is present, albeit more summary than analysis, and supported by the rest of the essay
• Thesis sentence is present but not supported by the rest of the essay
• Not present

There are two main types of rubrics for evaluating student work: holistic and analytic rubrics . Each has its strengths with regard to how educators can approach evaluation of student learning. A third type of rubric is the checklist, which contains no performance descriptions, and is solely composed of criteria.

Holistic rubrics focus on the overall product or performance rather than the components. For instance, instead of dividing essay evaluation into an evaluation of thesis, supporting arguments, structure, and so forth and so on, holistic rubrics look at the entire efficacy of the essay itself. Hence, holistic rubrics would have criteria that describe competency levels of essay writing in a single scale, from “essay does not successfully argue its point with no supporting arguments and consistent writing errors” to “essay introduces original ideas with strong supporting arguments and technical writing excellence.”

A holistic rubric produces a single score based on a judgment of overall student work.

Holistic rubrics are used when missteps can be tolerated, and the focus is on general quality and what the learner can do rather than what they cannot do ( Chase, 1999 ). Oftentimes, holistic rubrics can be used when student skills are more advanced. They can also save time because there are fewer components and decisions to consider.

Because they focus on the generalized quality of student work, it may be more challenging to provide feedback on specific components. This may be challenging when, for example, a student’s work is at varying levels—for example, if an essay has original ideas, analysis, and supporting arguments but has many syntactical errors. Additionally, because holistic rubrics tend towards sweeping descriptions, scoring may be susceptible to subjectivity.

Analytic rubrics provide levels of performance for multiple criteria, with scores for separate and individual components of student work; they assess work in multiple dimensions. Analytic rubrics also provide descriptions for each of these performance levels so students know what is expected of them ( Mertler, 2001 ). Additionally, criterion can be weighted differently to reflect the importance of each component.

Because they are more comprehensive and examine different components of student work, they take more time to develop. And unless the description for each criteria is well defined, scoring may be inconsistent.

With checklist rubrics, there are only two performance levels (yes/no, present/absent, pass/fail, etc.). And a useful checklist usually has many criteria. They do enable faster grading, and a checklist provides ample clarity for students. Checklists enable an all-or-nothing approach, which is helpful at certain stages of learning. For instance, if a student is learning to write an essay, a checklist is an effective way for students to understand what they need to provide.

Oftentimes, a checklist can be converted into an analytic rubric.

Checklists are long, and may be time-consuming to create. When students are no longer new to a topic, checklists don’t provide the nuanced feedback necessary to move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. In other words, checklists aren’t as helpful when students are “most of the way” towards competence.

A rubric is most often structured like a matrix with two main components: criteria (usually listed on the left side) and the performance descriptions (listed across the top).

Rubric development involves several steps:

• Define the purpose of an assessment
• Establish evaluation criteria
• Determine performance levels
• Provide descriptions for each performance level

Is an assignment measuring the presence of criteria or the quality of criteria?

Consider the student stage of learning in this step. When students are just beginning to write an essay or engage in geometry theorems, they are in early stages of learning. Students learning a new concept or skill may benefit from a binary approach towards whether criteria is present or not.

Students in more advanced stages of learning may benefit from being measured by a spectrum of quality.

Analytic and holistic rubrics measure the quality of criteria. Checklists or checklist rubrics measure the presence of criteria.

When developing rubrics, select the most important criteria in evaluating student work. Part of establishing criteria is asking yourself questions about what you want to identify in student work. For instance, why are you giving students this assignment? What are the characteristics of good student work? What specific skills do you want demonstrated in the assessment?

By asking yourself questions about the purpose of the assessment and how it aligns to learning objectives, you can then decide the 3-8 criteria that shows what you want students to achieve.

Determine what the performance levels should be and how many. There are usually 3-5 performance levels (qualitative), and oftentimes they are associated with scores or points (quantitative). You may want to begin with the anchors (best and worst), first before exploring how many levels you want in between. Students can often be confused by the “fuzzy” middle, so it is important to make each level distinct.

According to notable researcher Susan Brookhart, it is important to be clear and thorough in performance descriptions, which also prompt student learning. Brookhart states, “If the criterion is simply having or counting something in their work (e.g., “has 5 paragraphs”), students need not pay attention to the quality of what their work has. If the criterion is substantive (e.g., “states a compelling thesis”), attention to quality becomes part of the work” ( Brookhart, 2018 ).

For holistic rubrics, it is critical to write thorough and clear narrative descriptions of each criterion, particularly because they have to be comprehensive in describing the whole product.

For analytic rubrics, each criterion needs a description of performance level.

Language should be neutral and as objective as possible, avoiding subjective words like “interesting.” Instead, outline objective indicators like “new idea that analyzes instead of summarizes.”

Finally, consider evaluating your own rubric.

Depaul University’s Teaching Commons suggests the following questions to ask when evaluating a rubric:

• Does the rubric relate to the outcome(s) being measured?
• Does it cover important criteria for student performance?
• Does the top end of the rubric reflect excellence?
• Are the criteria and scales well-defined?
• Can the rubric be applied consistently by different scorers?

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but it is helpful to distinguish their differences. Rubrics are used to communicate student performance and expectations on assessments. Scales, on the other hand, describe how a student has progressed in their learning journey relative to stated learning goals ( University of Maryland Baltimore ).

“Rubrics with criteria that are about the task—with descriptions of performance that amount to checklists for directions—assess compliance and not learning. Rubrics with counts instead of quality descriptions assess the existence of something and not its quality,” according to Brookhart ( 2013 ).

Confusing learning outcomes with tasks can result in using rubrics as a checklist, which are often binary (e.g., “yes/no”) in nature. But rubrics that are more descriptive and reflect higher-order thinking provide students with action items, uphold assessment with integrity, and improve learning outcomes.

Rubrics that do not align to learning goals can also limit learning. Ensure that rubrics focus on core learning goals and are in alignment with course expectations. For example, if formatting margins on an essay is not a course objective but is included in rubrics, the efficacy of that rubric may be compromised. Students may confuse what it is they should do with what it is they should learn; when this occurs, once the students complete a task, they may feel their learning has ended instead of seeing learning as a continuum.

Other misperceptions include confusing rubrics with evaluative rating scales. Rating scales are useful for grading, and involve evaluations across a scale without description (e.g., 1-5, always/sometimes/never or A-F). While rating scales are useful for grading, they don’t offer students a description of quality that they can utilize as they navigate learning.

While effective rubrics can foster learning, they can be limited in scope. If, according to Angelo State University’s Instruction Design , “educators use the rubric to tell students what to put in an assignment, then that may be all they put. It may also be all that they learn.”

Wolf and Stevens, state that rubrics have more advantages than disadvantages but “If poorly designed they can actually diminish the learning process. Rubrics can act as a straitjacket, preventing creations other than those envisioned by the rubric-maker from unfolding. (“If it is not on the rubric, it must not be important or possible.”) The challenge then is to create a rubric that makes clear what is valued in the performance or product—without constraining or diminishing them” ( Wolf & Stevens, 2007 ).

Effective rubrics also take a lot of time to develop.

The formative feedback process, a core element of student-teacher communication, begins with setting expectations. Rubrics are “one way to make learning expectations explicit for learners” (Brookhart, 2018 ). These clear and explicit expectations help students see what learning looks like so that they can then absorb feedback in alignment with those learning goals.

Jay McTighe specifies that effective rubrics do the following:

• Clearly define criteria for judging student performance based on targeted standards/outcomes
• Promote more consistent evaluation of student performance
• Help clarify instructional goals and serve as teaching targets
• Provide specific feedback to learners and teachers
• Help students focus on the important dimensions of a product or performance
• Enable criterion-based evaluation and standards-based grading
• Support student self- and peer-assessment ( McTighe, 2016 ).

Rubrics give students a greater chance of achieving a clear and defined target. They guide curriculum planning and uphold accurate assessments with integrity. Effective rubrics enable self-assessment and self-directed student learning.

Effective rubrics support the student learning journey. Additionally, rubrics have the potential to advance the learning of historically marginalized students. According to Wolf and Stevens, “An often unrecognized benefit of rubrics is that they can make learning expectations or assumptions about the tasks themselves more explicit ( Andrade & Ying, 2005 ). In academic environments [sic] we often operate on unstated cultural assumptions about the expectations for student performance and behavior and presume that all students share those same understandings” ( 2007, p. 13 ). In other words, rubrics make explicit what may be too nuanced for first generation students or English learners to access.

Rubrics are, in essence, not only part of assessment but also a teaching and learning junction with the potential to increase student learning outcomes and uphold integrity. When students feel supported, their love of learning increases into a lifelong journey.

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The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay | Steps & Examples

An academic essay is a focused piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation.

There are many types of essays you might write as a student. The content and length of an essay depends on your level, subject of study, and course requirements. However, most essays at university level are argumentative — they aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.

The essay writing process consists of three main stages:

• Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline.
• Writing : Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion.
• Revision:  Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling, and formatting of your essay.

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Table of contents

Essay writing process, preparation for writing an essay, writing the introduction, writing the main body, writing the conclusion, essay checklist, lecture slides, frequently asked questions about writing an essay.

The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay .

For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

• Understand your assignment: What is the goal of this essay? What is the length and deadline of the assignment? Is there anything you need to clarify with your teacher or professor?
• Define a topic: If you’re allowed to choose your own topic , try to pick something that you already know a bit about and that will hold your interest.
• Do your research: Read  primary and secondary sources and take notes to help you work out your position and angle on the topic. You’ll use these as evidence for your points.
• Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
• Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

1. Hook your reader

The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

3. Present the thesis statement

Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

Length of the body text

The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

Paragraph structure

To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

That idea is introduced in a  topic sentence . The topic sentence should generally lead on from the previous paragraph and introduce the point to be made in this paragraph. Transition words can be used to create clear connections between sentences.

After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

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The conclusion is the final paragraph of an essay. It should generally take up no more than 10–15% of the text . A strong essay conclusion :

• Returns to your thesis
• Ties together your main points
• Shows why your argument matters

A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

What not to include in a conclusion

To make your essay’s conclusion as strong as possible, there are a few things you should avoid. The most common mistakes are:

• Including new arguments or evidence
• Undermining your arguments (e.g. “This is just one approach of many”)
• Using concluding phrases like “To sum up…” or “In conclusion…”

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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Checklist: Essay

My essay follows the requirements of the assignment (topic and length ).

My introduction sparks the reader’s interest and provides any necessary background information on the topic.

My introduction contains a thesis statement that states the focus and position of the essay.

I use paragraphs to structure the essay.

I use topic sentences to introduce each paragraph.

Each paragraph has a single focus and a clear connection to the thesis statement.

I make clear transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

My conclusion doesn’t just repeat my points, but draws connections between arguments.

I don’t introduce new arguments or evidence in the conclusion.

I have given an in-text citation for every quote or piece of information I got from another source.

I have included a reference page at the end of my essay, listing full details of all my sources.

My citations and references are correctly formatted according to the required citation style .

My essay has an interesting and informative title.

I have followed all formatting guidelines (e.g. font, page numbers, line spacing).

Your essay meets all the most important requirements. Our editors can give it a final check to help you submit with confidence.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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15 What Are We Being Graded On?

Jeremy Levine

Grades are an (often) unmentioned but all-powerful force in the writing classroom. We know that grades mean a great deal to students, motivating many of their decisions in the classroom. [1] But because grading is uncomfortable and inexact work, we rarely discuss it openly in class — a silence that can leave students in the dark about the standards toward which they should write. This essay is a guide to that imprecision; it seeks to lay out for students the different considerations that go into a grading policy so that they can read assignments and rubrics with a more discerning eye. In showing students the many ways that grading standards shift across writing situations, this essay will help students adjust to new and even unclear sets of standards as well as equip students to assess their own writing on terms other than grades.

I’ve heard from students over the years about papers they’d been proud of that got bad grades. Usually, these stories involve a lot of time and energy that a student invested in the paper, learning quite a lot along the way and creating something better than they thought they could when they started — only for that work to not be rewarded with a good grade. When I ask my students why they might have gotten the bad grade, they usually say something to the effect of “I didn’t write what they were looking for.”

After hearing a few of these stories, I decided to try to do something about it. As the writing teacher, I figured that it was my job to help my students understand what their instructors were looking for, which meant showing them what a teacher thinks about when grading writing. To do this, I decided that we would take a day out of each of our units, right before papers were due, to write our grading rubric as a class. This process would supposedly help students think through the different issues that teachers come across when grading papers, so that they didn’t end up with so many grading miscommunications—and it would leave everyone perfectly clear on the standards for that particular essay. Since we were having the conversation at the end of the writing process, we would have a common understanding of what constituted quality for that particular assignment based on what we covered in class. We would quickly arrive at a happy consensus.

It only took two papers for this idea to completely implode. For that second assignment, my students wrote responses to music albums. Each student picked an album they liked and wrote an essay that extended its meaning or put it in a new perspective. It was a vague prompt — my hope was that we would get a bunch of different kinds of papers and everyone would see that each writer in the class had a different writing approach. Even though parts of that assignment idea still hold up, one student from that class explains why these different approaches caused a problem when it came to grading: “I think the main issue with a student-designed rubric was that it wasn’t exactly clear what we were supposed to focus on in our writing….There was a lack of direction with the essay that came from the lack of rubric, it was very challenging to write an essay on a vague prompt without a rubric.” Based on this student’s report, I can see that the students knew that designing the rubric would eventually require us to reach some standards — and writing the paper without knowing the standards would mean that there was a chance that they would do it wrong.

That’s exactly what happened. On rubric day, we ended up with a bunch of writing-related words up on the whiteboard (“Style!” “Purpose!” “Audience!” “Organization!”), but no consensus around what counted as success in any of those categories. The different approaches the students took made it impossible to assess everyone’s writing fairly under one definition of these words. Some definitions were too narrow, like “a well-organized paper talks about the artist’s background first, and then this album specifically,” which is not necessarily true. If someone wrote about how the album makes them feel, then the artist’s background may not be important. It would be unfair to grade that essay under that definition. On the other side of the spectrum, the definition could also get too broad, like “A well-organized paper is easy to understand.” How do we judge that? What’s easy for one reader to understand might not be easy for another, which could lead to students to be surprised by a bad grade when they thought that their paper was easy to follow.

We went in circles like this for a long time and eventually threw out the idea of the class-designed rubric. The student who first proposed we change our approach explained that “Introducing [the rubric] after my paper was almost complete meant many different interpretations could take place in both writing style, organization, and key aspects of the paper, [which] made me feel lost and incorrect in the way my paper was written.” She wanted to change our strategy to avoid these kinds of feelings. I did, too; anyone who read her paper would tell you that it was great — definitely not incorrect. She helped me realize that having everyone advocate for a definition of something like organization or style meant that I was actually inviting them to impose that definition on everyone else, just like the professors giving students those bad grades had done. We ended up caught between two equally bad options: come up with clear, narrow definitions that would fail to recognize the quality of some essays in the class, or come up with criteria that are so broad (such as “the organization of the paper makes sense”) that they don’t actually guide the writing or grading process.

This class session turned out to exemplify the complex issue at the heart of grading writing: In order to assess something, you have to define it and have a list of criteria you use to execute your judgment, but writing is complex and often defies that easy categorization. If a teacher’s definition of good writing is rather particular, or is somehow unclear to you, then high-quality writing that does not match that definition is liable to get a bad score. This issue is the subject of this essay: I am going to focus on the reason why different definitions of writing are perfectly natural, even if they do make grading complicated. With that knowledge, we can approach some solutions — methods for reading expectations critically, as well as some ways that both teachers and students can leverage the judgment of writing in a way to make it more inclusive and helpful for your learning. I don’t mean to imply that writing for a grade is the best way to grow as a writer, or that it is good that grades can have such a strong influence on writing (I don’t think that it is — but that’s a conversation for another time). My goal with this essay is to explain why the grading of writing happens a certain way, so that you can decide how, when, or why you choose to meet these expectations.

Defining “Good Writing”

I write every day. I write academic essays, grocery lists, journal entries, text messages to my friends, among many other things. The metric I use to assess “good writing” in each of these situations changes dramatically — a well-written grocery list helps me move through the store efficiently, whereas a well-written journal entry helps me process my thoughts and feelings about the day. (If I’m feeling sad, listing off vegetables is not going to help me feel better.) “Good writing” looks different in every situation, which means that there is no definition of “good writing” that applies to every situation.

Sure, you might say, but when we’re talking about writing in school, we’re not talking about grocery lists and journal entries. We’re talking about academic writing. That’s true, but not all academic writing is the same. Academic writing in history is different from English, or biology, or political science. Even within one academic discipline, or even one genre within that discipline, there are many different measures of success. Anne Herrington, a writing teacher and researcher, once did a study focusing on how college engineering students and instructors interpreted the same assignment. Her results show us that a genre — in this case, the lab report — can be interpreted in different, equally valid ways. Herrington explains that, for that assignment, “the students perceived their audience as quite knowledgeable of detail, theory, and technical terms while the faculty perceived the audience as less knowledgeable, particularly of details and theory” (345-6). The two groups imagined the assignment’s intended audience differently, which led to the students writing in a way that did not match the instructors’ expectations. They would leave out information that they assumed that their audience already had, while instructors were reading the papers trying to figure out why the very same information was missing. Because the two sides understood the premise of the assignment in different ways, students were unable to meet their instructors’ expectations even though they might have done the assignment perfectly according to their own understanding of it. This means that matching someone’s definition of good writing means making sure that you understand the writing situation in similar ways.

“Writing situation” can mean a lot of different things. We don’t quite have space in this essay to get into all of the complexities of a writing situation, but there are three ideas here that you might find helpful when thinking about grading specifically. You might recognize two of them (reader preferences and reader/writer relationships) from the rhetorical situation that may be part of your composition course. The other concept (genre) is also related to the rhetorical situation; a genre is a typical way of responding to a common rhetorical situation.

• Let’s start with genres. If your writing situation is “I need to express gratitude,” then you’ll write a thank-you note. There are certain conventions that you’re supposed to meet in order to signal to your reader that you’re participating in the thank-you note genre (starting with “Dear,” telling them that you are grateful, explaining why their gift or favor was meaningful to you). If you succeed, your reader will recognize your writing as a thank-you note (because they also know the rules and conventions of the genre), and feel appreciated.
• A situation could also involve the preferences of a particular reader. If I give my friend in her twenties a handwritten thank-you card for dropping off a book at my house, she might think that it’s strangely old-fashioned. I could have sent her a text. But, if I wanted to send a thank-you card to my elderly neighbor, who does not text or email, I would have to write my note by hand and drop it off at her house. This doesn’t have much to do with my own writing preferences, but with what my reader needs or wants.
• Still, thank-you notes do not all look the same because the relationship between giver and receiver will affect what is said — the thank-you note you write for your favorite high school teacher that expresses gratitude for years of mentorship will be different from the thank-you note you write to your uncle for feeding your cat while you were away for the weekend. One is an expression of emotional or intellectual gratitude, the other is an indication that a favor did not go unnoticed. A different tone is probably warranted.

So, genres, relationships, and individual reader preferences all help us come to an understanding of what “good writing” ought to look like in a given circumstance. What does this have to do with grades? Well, in college, you’re likely to meet many different writing situations as you go from assignment to assignment and class to class. The writing situations embedded in each of these assignments will be different, but not always obviously so. It’s then important to do some detective work in figuring out a) what the situation is and b) what the expectations are for that situation. This is a complex process, but here are some quick strategies you can use to get to know the different writing situations you’ll come across in college.

Learning Genres

• I was trying to do X .
• My instructor said that this was good/bad for reason Y .
• Next time I will try Z .Framing feedback in terms of what you were trying to do will help you be successful when you encounter similar situations in the future — and be sure to catalogue the good things your instructors say, too!
• Think about what you’re not supposed to do in a given situation. While this might feel restrictive, it will help you figure out which writing strategies actually are available to you. Something like “I’m not supposed to write a five-paragraph essay for this ten-page paper” starts you in a place of figuring out a new organizational strategy (Reiff and Bawarshi 329).
• Ask for models. If you’re not sure about what a particular genre should look like, ask your instructor for an example. Don’t copy the model directly; use it as a way to get an idea for what sort of approach you should be after.

Learning Relationships

• Most academic assignments have some kind of framing — your instructor wants you to occupy a certain role and write to a particular audience. On an assignment sheet you might read “make a case to a general audience,” which should signal that you should explain key terms that a layperson might not understand, or spend some time telling them why a particular issue is important. You also might read something like “imagine you work at a company and a supervisor has asked you for a report,” which should signal that you should write your report toward that company’s needs, rather than about the topic in general. Always write to the audience indicated on the assignment, even if it feels artificial (Hinton 22).
• If there is no stated relationship on an assignment sheet, that does not mean that there isn’t one. Feel free to ask your instructor “what kind of audience are we writing for?” which will often give you a hint about how to approach your writing.
• Think of yourself as contributing to an ongoing conversation about the topic. Even though it’s tempting to just think of yourself as a student writing for a grade, if you instead start to think of yourself as answering a question with your instructor, rather than for your instructor, you can feel more like an insider. This can lead to deeper engagement with the work. (McCarthy 256-7).

Learning Preferences

• Look for clues in assignment sheets and syllabi about what good writing might be, but ask questions about slippery words such as “clear,” “well-written,” or “academic.”
• Early in a course, if you’re unsure about expectations, submit a draft of a piece for feedback. Ask specifically about whether what you have written meets the instructor’s expectations.
• Check the syllabus to see if there are any grade expectations articulated there, or any particular formatting/structural requirements.

Definitions and Exclusion

Sometimes, it can be a challenge to make sense of the instructor’s preferences. Certain things might seem really important to this instructor that, to you, don’t seem important at all. Of course, there will be instructors who will be very clear about what they expect, and why. But, for those situations where it’s less obvious, let’s turn to James Paul Gee, a well-respected linguist, who has a useful way of thinking about this issue.

Gee uses the word discourse to refer to a “saying-doing-being-valuing-believing combination” (6), meaning a Discourse is a way of understanding and talking about the world. A Discourse can include members of an academic discipline (like history or chemistry), or players of a particular sport (say, basketball), or musicians in a particular genre (such as country). At the very core of a Discourse is a belief system: maybe the academic discipline values a certain kind of knowledge, or the basketball players have a certain ethic of how to play the game. This means that, as you work your way into specific academic disciplines, you’re really learning the beliefs and values of that Discourse. These belief systems are often invisible, but they form the foundation of your belonging.

To someone grading your writing, determining whether or not something is done correctly is then often a question of whether or not it fits in with the expectations and value systems of a Discourse. But, because it’s hard to tell whether someone shares a belief system with you just by glancing at the way they talk or write, people sometimes rely on “superficial features” to see who belongs to their Discourse and who doesn’t. Superficial features are things that rest on the surface of writing or speaking that somehow reveal the writer as not belonging in the Discourse (Gee 11). For the basketball players, superficial features might involve using certain terminology to describe a play. For the country musicians, it might be having a singing voice with twang. Examples of superficial features in academic writing might involve punctuation, formatting, sentence structure, vocabulary, or even the structure of a piece. Missing these qualities could certainly be perceived as a mistake, but none indicate that the person in question doesn’t believe in the values of an academic discipline, basketball, or country music. It just looks that way to an insider.

This is what makes it possible to miss the expectations of an assignment without knowing it: you might write something in a way that is perfectly acceptable to the Discourses that are familiar to you, but don’t belong to the one that you’re becoming part of by taking the class. It might be the case that you understand the values of the Discourses, but your superficial features give you away as a newcomer. It’s worth paying attention to this distinction in your own classes: is the grading scale assessing the part of the Discourse that is about beliefs and values, or the part that is about superficial features? If it is focusing on superficial features, which ones?

What To Do with Grading

It might feel like all of this is irrelevant to you as a student. Teachers are the ones who set the grading criteria, and only rarely do they bring students into this process. All of this is true. At the same time, it is important for you to know why the grading of writing is such unstable business. This background will let you ask the right questions that allow you to do well in the face of the many different assessment systems you’ll face in college. Plenty of people will say “writing is subjective and there’s no one way to grade it,” but that’s only part of the issue. The real issue is the very specific way that writing is subjective — the way that conflicting definitions of good writing can mark someone as an outsider to a community. Going into a college writing situation with this information makes it more possible for you to understand what, exactly, you’re being graded on.

It’s also possible to use the imperfection of grading to pull different kinds of meaning and validation out of your writing projects. We now know that an instructor’s grading scale is only one way to measure a writing project, which means that you can also try to assign your own markers of quality. Maybe you’ve always organized your paper in one particular way and you decide to try a new strategy. A grade might not recognize the success that you have in trying this new method, but that does not mean it wasn’t important or helpful in your development as a writer. Working with the limitations of grading gives you the space to assess your writing on your own terms, a process that can help you improve as a writer over time. After all, you’re the only one who is tracking your growth from one class to the next. You also might decide that pursuing the grade is not the most important thing to you — that there are other things that you want to do or say with your writing that your instructor might not be actively looking for.

There’s another reason why it’s important to recognize that all writing assessment deals with narrow definitions of “good writing.” Even though you don’t spend your nights and weekends grading stacks of student writing, you assess writing (and speaking) all the time. You can immediately recognize when someone is an outsider to your Discourse — maybe you play a sport and can easily tell when someone is inexperienced, or you can identify someone who isn’t from your city because they mispronounce a street name. The immediate reaction, most of the time, is to label this person as an outsider, which makes it difficult for that person to contribute to the group with any credibility (even if they believe in its values). This is just like what happens when you get a bad grade on a project because of some formatting rule that you didn’t know about — you labelled yourself as an outsider to the discourse.

In plenty of situations, this kind of judgment around language happens because of differences in language, dialect, and accent — factors that are often (but not always) traceable to race, nationality, and class. For example, I remember a teacher telling my whole sixth-grade class to never say “ax” instead of “ask,” because it seems unprofessional. It’s important to point out that “ax” is a pronunciation that is grounded in Black American speech (McWhorter) and is not “unprofessional” in and of itself. It is merely labeled unprofessional — graded that way — by people who have been told that it doesn’t fit. It’s another superficial feature.

None of this is to say that the superficial features are necessarily bad. These communal ways of speaking evolved for a reason: they help get across complicated ideas quickly and they help bind a group together. (If you’re playing basketball, it’s much easier to shout “box out” than it is to say “you there, please block the opposing player from getting near the basket for a rebound.”) The problem arises when superficial features are used as a way of keeping people from participating in a community without good reason — especially when the communities in question, like the academic community, or the community of a given workplace, have a lot to offer to people who are included. When these exclusionary judgments are made on a large scale because of understandings of language assessment that are dependent on these superficial features, they can make racism, xenophobia, and classism worse. To learn more about how this happens, see Alvarez et al. in this volume of Writing Spaces . The only way to undo that is to pay closer attention to the way that we judge the way people express themselves, and bring attention to how those judgments are taught to new generations in schools. To do this, it might be helpful to take up some reflective activities around race and language (see Grayson, also this volume).

I propose that we channel frustrations with the limited definitions of good writing that we encounter in school toward developing more generous definitions of good writing and speaking in everyday life. A lot of the time, when I tell people that I think that we should grade the writing of students on whether or not they have exciting ideas that speak to the values of a Discourse, rather than the superficial features, someone usually responds: “Sure, but then when that person applies for a job and they’re still making mistakes on superficial features, they’ll never get hired.” I believe that this is only true because we make it true — because we choose to continue to judge writing in this way. This is where you come in: I think that people who make mistakes on Standard Edited Academic English are only excluded because that’s the way most people were told to judge writing and speaking in schools and other professional settings. If, instead, we had a population of people who knew to interpret people’s differences in language as interesting and productive, then we could begin to chip away at the way day-to-day language assessment facilitates exclusion from those spaces. Just as we need a critical mass of teachers to see student writing as valuable even if it has not yet mastered (or actively rejects) these superficial features, we need a large group of generous readers and listeners in everyday life. Cristina Sánchez-Martín’s article in this volume of Writing Spaces shares many more ideas on how we can develop this more generous approach to our language.

When it comes to the academic community, it’s also important to think about how writing instructors can grade differently so that we do not replicate these exclusionary systems. The good news is that many teachers are already doing this. Asao Inoue, for example, has written many articles about his labor-based grading contract, a grading scheme that assesses how much time a student spends on a project. The goal of this method is to separate grading from a student’s knowledge of a dominant academic discourse that they were not raised speaking, which diminishes the role of racially-driven judgments in his class (61). Maja Wilson takes a different approach, saying that an individual teacher’s opinions aren’t “a problem to be solved,” in grading because all writing is read by people with opinions. For her, this means a focus on narrative feedback, in which teachers focus their energy on what students are trying to do, rather than comparing to an ideal (45). These efforts from teachers, along with work that you can do in accepting and celebrating differences in Discourses, can help make our schools and the rest of our world a more inclusive place.

We went on a bit of a journey. We started with a problem that happened in my class: in trying to bring students into the rubric-designing process, I ended up inviting a flurry of different possible ways to assess one particular assignment, none of which would be fair to every student in my class. We found that this happened because assessing writing means defining good writing, which sometimes is done in narrow, Discourse-specific ways. We then explored some ways that you can take up that conversation yourself and covered more generous ways that writing can be assessed both in schools and everyday life.

How does this affect your day-to-day writing in school? Apart from trying to start conversations about how writing is assessed in your classes, this perspective on the narrowness of standards helps us think about writing in school differently. A lot of the time, it’s easy to think that you are writing to a vast standard of “good writing” that remains the same across every class. With the knowledge that writing is assessed differently in every situation, you can approach each assignment as its own entity with its own complex relationship between speaker, audience, genre, and subject. Asking “how is ‘good writing’ defined according to this assignment?” will help set you up to be more nimble as you move from one situation to the next.

Works Cited

Alvarez, Sara P., et al. “Workin’ Languages: Who We are Matters in our Writing.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Volume 4, edited by Dana Driscoll, Mary Stewart, and Matt Vetter. Parlor Press, 2021.

Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.”  Journal of Education , vol. 17, no. 1, 1989, pp. 5-17.

Grayson, Mara Lee. “Writing toward Racial Literacy.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Volume 4, edited by Dana Driscoll, Mary Stewart, and Matt Vetter. Parlor Press, 2021.

Herrington, Anne J. “Writing in Academic Settings: A Study of the Contexts for Writing in Two College Chemical Engineering Courses.”  Research in the Teaching of English , vol. 19, no. 4, 1985, pp. 331-61.

Hinton, Corrine E. “So You’ve Got a Writing Assignment. Now What?”  Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 18-33.

Inoue, Asao B.  Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom . WAC Clearinghouse, 2019.

McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. “A Stranger in Strange lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum.”  Research in the Teaching of English , vol. 21, no. 3, 1987, 233-65.

McWhorter, John. “The ‘Ax’ Versus ‘Ask’ Question.” The Los Angeles Times , 19 January 2014. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2014-jan-19-la-oe-mcwhorter-black-speech-ax-20140119-story.html . Accessed 17 August, 2020.

Reiff, Mary Jo, and Anis Bawarshi. “Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition.”  Written Communication , vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, pp. 312-37.

Sánchez-Martín, Cristina. “Beyond Language Difference in Writing: Investigating Complex and Equitable Language Practices.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Volume 4, edited by Dana Driscoll, Megan Heise, Mary Stewart, and Matt Vetter. Parlor Press, 2021.

Wilson, Maja. Reimagining Writing Assessment: From Scales to Stories . Heinemann, 2018.

Teacher Resources for What Are We Being Graded On?

Writing teachers know that grading is fraught with questions about what writing is in the first place. This essay takes the position that students should be aware of this complexity so that they can redefine the grading of writing as not the application of static standards but instead something that changes from one situation to the next. In the big picture, this understanding of grading helps students understand more about writing itself. The essay also gives students practical tips on how to interpret grading standards, and offers some new ways to think about how their writing is graded.

To do so, this essay relies on an illustrative anecdote from my own teaching where a failure to define clear standards led to an unfair grading situation. It then moves to contextualize that example within the notion of situational writing, and uses James Paul Gee’s theory of Discourse to explain how students may be marked as outsiders when writing in college.

Teaching Strategies

Because of its multiple purposes (its practical advice and its broader theoretical basis), this essay can be helpful at various points in the semester. The essay may help in the beginning, when students are just acclimating to college and are unsure of what will be expected of them — this essay might give them a useful framework for interpreting the many assignments that will come their way.

It also might be a helpful essay to give out in conjunction with the first writing assignment of the semester. It can help students read the assignment sheet or rubric closely, and you can invite the class to construct definitions of certain words (“clear,” “original,” “well-organized”) in an attempt to build consensus around the standards for an assignment. One method may be to assign students to investigate particular components of your rubric in small groups, and allowing groups to present to each other about what they think constitutes success in each of these categories, which invites you to enter a productive conversation with your students about your own expectations.

If assigning this essay early in the semester, it might be worth bringing the feedback log to class as an in-class assignment. Students could keep the feedback log privately in a writing notebook, documenting the responses that you or their peers had to the choices that they made. You could also assign the feedback log as small-group work, where students can discuss what they learned from the feedback, or come up with some new strategies for achieving their goals.

This essay also may fit near the end of the semester, when students are working on high-stakes final projects in your class (or in other classes) and may want to know how to navigate expectations. You might ask students to compare different evaluative terms across different assignments in your class or in other classes that they have taken so that they can practice identifying these slippery terms in the future.

This piece may be helpful for a teacher revising their own syllabi or rubrics. Some teachers may rely on the abstract terms that are mentioned in this piece (like organization, or purpose) and doing a deep dive on how those words can get picked up by students could help a teacher clarify how they are using those words in their materials. It also presents an opportunity to consider the role of surface-level features in grading — there isn’t a problem with showing students discourse-specific language, but this piece offers a framework for reflecting on the relationship between those features and course grades.

Discussion Questions

• When reading this essay, could you think of any specific writing assignments from your past where you felt like there was a miscommunication of expectations? What happened? What was the teacher expecting, and what did you offer instead?
• What should the writer of this essay have done with the problem he posed in the beginning? What would have been a fair way to grade all of these essays while still offering guidance on how to meet expectations?
• Near the end of the essay, the writer suggests that you can set your own assessment standards for yourself. Think about a paper that you have coming up: what do you want to get out of it? How do you think you can use it to improve your writing?
• How does hearing about the imprecision of grading methods make you feel?
• How else can students get to know the expectations of a given writing assignment? What strategies have you used in the past?
• Can you think of a time that your writing or speaking marked you as an outsider to a group, or where you noticed someone did not belong to a group you are part of because of the way they spoke or wrote? What was the marker of difference, and what happened?
• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and is subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

What Are We Being Graded On? Copyright © 2021 by Jeremy Levine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

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

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

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

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Step 1: Analyze the assignment

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

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

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

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

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

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

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

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

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

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

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

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

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

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

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

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

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

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

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

Step 5: Design the rating scale

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

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

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

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

Building a rubric from scratch

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

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

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

Well-written descriptions:

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

Step 7: Create your rubric

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

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

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

• Teacher assistants

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

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

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

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

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

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

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

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

Criteria for Grading Essays

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The concept is elegantly simple: teachers input or copy the students’ essays into the provided text box, select the appropriate grade level and subject, and ClassX’s AI Essay Grader takes it from there. Leveraging the cutting-edge technology of ChatGPT, the AI system meticulously evaluates essays against a predefined rubric. The rubric encompasses various criteria, ranging from content depth and structure to grammar and style, ensuring a comprehensive assessment of the writing.

Teachers can now allocate more time to personalized instruction, classroom engagement, and curriculum development, rather than being bogged down by the time-consuming task of manual essay evaluation. The AI’s rapid and consistent grading also means that students receive prompt feedback on their work, enabling them to learn from their mistakes and improve their writing skills at an accelerated pace.

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Essay tests are useful for teachers when they want students to select, organize, analyze, synthesize, and/or evaluate information. In other words, they rely on the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy . There are two types of essay questions: restricted and extended response.

• Restricted Response - These essay questions limit what the student will discuss in the essay based on the wording of the question. For example, "State the main differences between John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's beliefs about federalism," is a restricted response. What the student is to write about has been expressed to them within the question.
• Extended Response - These allow students to select what they wish to include in order to answer the question. For example, "In Of Mice and Men , was George's killing of Lennie justified? Explain your answer." The student is given the overall topic, but they are free to use their own judgment and integrate outside information to help support their opinion.

Student Skills Required for Essay Tests

Before expecting students to perform well on either type of essay question, we must make sure that they have the required skills to excel. Following are four skills that students should have learned and practiced before taking essay exams:

• The ability to select appropriate material from the information learned in order to best answer the question.
• The ability to organize that material in an effective manner.
• The ability to show how ideas relate and interact in a specific context.
• The ability to write effectively in both sentences and paragraphs.

Constructing an Effective Essay Question

Following are a few tips to help in the construction of effective essay questions:

• Begin with the lesson objectives in mind. Make sure to know what you wish the student to show by answering the essay question.
• Decide if your goal requires a restricted or extended response. In general, if you wish to see if the student can synthesize and organize the information that they learned, then restricted response is the way to go. However, if you wish them to judge or evaluate something using the information taught during class, then you will want to use the extended response.
• If you are including more than one essay, be cognizant of time constraints. You do not want to punish students because they ran out of time on the test.
• Write the question in a novel or interesting manner to help motivate the student.
• State the number of points that the essay is worth. You can also provide them with a time guideline to help them as they work through the exam.
• If your essay item is part of a larger objective test, make sure that it is the last item on the exam.

Scoring the Essay Item

One of the downfalls of essay tests is that they lack in reliability. Even when teachers grade essays with a well-constructed rubric, subjective decisions are made. Therefore, it is important to try and be as reliable as possible when scoring your essay items. Here are a few tips to help improve reliability in grading:

• Determine whether you will use a holistic or analytic scoring system before you write your rubric . With the holistic grading system, you evaluate the answer as a whole, rating papers against each other. With the analytic system, you list specific pieces of information and award points for their inclusion.
• Prepare the essay rubric in advance. Determine what you are looking for and how many points you will be assigning for each aspect of the question.
• Avoid looking at names. Some teachers have students put numbers on their essays to try and help with this.
• Score one item at a time. This helps ensure that you use the same thinking and standards for all students.
• Avoid interruptions when scoring a specific question. Again, consistency will be increased if you grade the same item on all the papers in one sitting.
• If an important decision like an award or scholarship is based on the score for the essay, obtain two or more independent readers.
• Beware of negative influences that can affect essay scoring. These include handwriting and writing style bias, the length of the response, and the inclusion of irrelevant material.
• Review papers that are on the borderline a second time before assigning a final grade.
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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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HOWTO: 3 Easy Steps to Grading Student Essays

In a world where number two pencils and bubbles on an answer sheet often determine a student’s grade, what criteria does the writing teacher use to evaluate the work of his or her students? After all, with essay writing you cannot simply mark some answers correct and others incorrect and figure out a percentage. The good news is that grading an essay can be just as easy and straightforward as grading multiple-choice tests with the use of a rubric!

What is a rubric?

• A rubric is a chart used in grading essays, special projects and other more items which can be more subjective. It lists each of the grading criteria separately and defines the different performance levels within those criteria. Standardized tests like the SAT’s use rubrics to score writing samples, and designing one for your own use is easy if you take it step by step. Keep in mind that when you are using a rubric to grade essays, you can design one rubric for use throughout the semester or modify your rubric as the expectations you have for your students increase.

How to Grade Student Essays

What should I include?

When students write essays, ESL teachers generally look for some common elements . The essay should have good grammar and show the right level of vocabulary . It should be organized, and the content should be appropriate and effective. Teachers also look at the overall effectiveness of the piece. When evaluating specific writing samples, you may also want to include other criteria for the essay based on material you have covered in class. You may choose to grade on the type of essay they have written and whether your students have followed the specific direction you gave. You may want to evaluate their use of information and whether they correctly presented the content material you taught. When you write your own rubric, you can evaluate anything you think is important when it comes to your students’ writing abilities. For our example, we will use grammar, organization and overall effect to create a rubric .

What is an A?

Using the criteria we selected ( grammar , organization and overall effect ) we will write a rubric to evaluate students’ essays. The most straightforward evaluation uses a four-point scale for each of the criteria. Taking the criteria one at a time, articulate what your expectations are for an A paper , a B paper and so on. Taking grammar as an example, an A paper would be free of most grammatical errors appropriate for the student’s language learning level. A B paper would have some mistakes but use generally good grammar. A C paper would show frequent grammatical errors. A D paper would show that the student did not have the grammatical knowledge appropriate for his language learning level. Taking these definitions, we now put them into the rubric.

The next step is to take each of the other criteria and define success for each of those, assigning a value to A, B, C and D papers. Those definitions then go into the rubric in the appropriate locations to complete the chart.

Each of the criteria will score points for the essay. The descriptions in the first column are each worth 4 points, the second column 3 points, the third 2 points and the fourth 1 point.

What is the grading process?

Now that your criteria are defined, grading the essay is easy. When grading a student essay with a rubric, it is best to read through the essay once before evaluating for grades . Then reading through the piece a second time, determine where on the scale the writing sample falls for each of the criteria. If the student shows excellent grammar, good organization and a good overall effect, he would score a total of ten points. Divide that by the total criteria, three in this case, and he finishes with a 3.33. which on a four-point scale is a B+. If you use five criteria to evaluate your essays, divide the total points scored by five to determine the student’s grade.

Once you have written your grading rubric, you may decide to share your criteria with your students.

If you do, they will know exactly what your expectations are and what they need to accomplish to get the grade they desire. You may even choose to make a copy of the rubric for each paper and circle where the student lands for each criterion. That way, each person knows where he needs to focus his attention to improve his grade. The clearer your expectations are and the more feedback you give your students, the more successful your students will be. If you use a rubric in your essay grading, you can communicate those standards as well as make your grading more objective with more practical suggestions for your students. In addition, once you write your rubric you can use it for all future evaluations.

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How to design a rubric that teachers can use and students can understand.

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FAQ for Writing Teachers

Top 25 AI-Powered Online Grading System Options for Faster Feedback

Imagine you're a teacher, overwhelmed by a pile of essays and assignments with overdue feedback. Sound familiar? Online grading systems can ease your workload and boost efficiency. With the integration of AI in the classroom , tasks like grading and personalized feedback become even more streamlined, allowing educators to focus on instruction rather than administrative duties. This article will guide you to an AI-powered grading system that speeds up feedback, saves time, and simplifies student performance evaluations. ‍ EssayGrader.ai is a powerful grading software for teachers designed to streamline assessments so you can focus on what truly matters: teaching and guiding your students.

What Is an Online Grading System?

Online grading systems are transforming how teachers manage academic performance. These digital platforms streamline the grading process, allowing educators to enter, track quickly, and report grades. They go beyond numbers, helping teachers manage:

• Assignments
• Communication with students and parents

With everything in one place, teachers can focus on teaching which matters most.

Real-Time Feedback: Keeping Everyone in the Loop

One of the standout features of online gradebooks is the ability to update grades instantly . Teachers can record and share their scores as soon as students complete assignments. This real-time feedback keeps students and parents informed. Students can see where they excel and where they need to improve, giving them time to make changes before the next big test. Parents can stay connected to their child's progress, offering support when needed.

Accessibility and Organization: A Teacher's Dream

Online gradebooks offer easy accessibility and organization. Teachers can access grades from anywhere, whether at school, home, or on the go. This flexibility makes it easy to keep everything organized and up to date. With a few clicks, teachers can sort and filter grades, making it simple to see how students are doing in specific areas. This level of organization helps teachers make informed decisions about instruction and support.

Promoting Student Empowerment and Parental Involvement

Online gradebooks empower students to take charge of their learning by providing real-time updates and easy access to grades. When students know where they stand, they can set goals and work towards achieving them. Parents can also play a more active role in their child's education, offering encouragement and guidance as needed. This level of involvement can make a big difference in a student's success.

Streamlining Communication With Parents and Students

Online gradebooks make communication between teachers, students, and parents a breeze. With a centralized platform , teachers can:

• Send messages
• Share feedback
• Provide updates with ease

This level of communication helps build solid relationships and ensures everyone is on the same page. When teachers, students, and parents work together, students can succeed better.

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AI's Role in Online Grading Systems

When grading is manual, a teacher’s mood, personal preferences, or unconscious biases can seep in. Such subjectivity risks unfair evaluations and inconsistent results. Plus, traditional grading is a time drain. Teachers slog through tests and assignments when they could be crafting lessons or guiding struggling students. And feedback? Limited. Students often get vague notes like “ Good job ” or “ Needs improvement ,” which leaves them in the dark about their strengths and shortcomings.

AI as a Grading Game-Changer

AI is the superhero that saves the day for educators. Its automated grading systems can handle multiple-choice questions and other tasks in the blink of an eye. That means students get feedback faster , grasping what they need to improve. 

AI’s objectivity is also a boon. It removes the risk of human biases tainting the results, ensuring a fair evaluation. And its scalability is a godsend. AI can handle thousands of exams with consistent assessments, eliminating the inconsistency of having multiple human graders.

Personalized Feedback Revolution

The magic of AI grading lies in its ability to tailor feedback to each student. Analyzing student responses can identify strengths and weaknesses and provide specific guidance to help them improve. 

This personalized feedback empowers students by showing them where to focus their efforts and giving them a roadmap for improvement. It also frees teachers from the burden of creating individualized guidance for every student, allowing them to focus on more meaningful interactions.

AI's Role in Making It Happen

AI powers automated grading systems with natural language processing algorithms that can decipher written responses. It uses pattern recognition to identify common mistakes or misconceptions, providing insights into where students need help. 

Its adaptive learning capabilities allow it to evolve and improve, generating more accurate and helpful feedback. The result is a grading process that’s fast, fair, and effective, allowing teachers to focus on the human aspect of education.

How Does an AI-Powered Online Grading System Work?

NLP: The Secret of AI Grading

AI-powered grading systems lean heavily on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand student responses. NLP algorithms break down text to assess its:

These systems use machine learning techniques to measure a student’s grasp of the subject matter. This analysis gives educators insights and helps students know where they stand. It’s like having an assistant who reads and understands text with the finesse of a human but at warp speed.

Pattern Recognition: Spotting Issues Before They Snowball

AI doesn’t just read; it recognizes patterns in student responses . Identifying common errors or misconceptions highlights areas where students struggle. This allows educators to adjust their teaching strategies, focusing on what matters. It’s like having a radar that picks up on trouble spots before they become real problems.

Adaptive Learning: Tailored Education for Every Student

As AI-powered grading systems process student data, they adapt and improve. They tailor feedback and recommendations, giving each learner a unique experience. This personalized approach helps students progress at their own pace. It’s like having a personal tutor that grows smarter with every interaction.

Feedback Generation: Detailed Insights Without the Hassle

AI algorithms can generate detailed feedback automatically. They highlight strengths and areas for improvement, providing guidance that’s as specific and actionable as what a teacher might give. This saves educators time, allowing them to focus on teaching rather than grading. It’s like having a time-saving assistant who ensures every student gets their needed help.

Revolutionize Your Grading With EssayGrader

Save 95% of your time grading school work with our tool to get high-quality, specific, and accurate writing feedback for essays in seconds with EssayGrader's grading software for teachers . Get started for free today!

8 Benefits of Online Gradebooks

1. Enhanced Accessibility and Convenience

Online grading systems revolutionize how educators, students, and parents interact with academic information. With just a few clicks, anyone can access real-time grades and feedback from anywhere with an internet connection. This accessibility breaks down barriers and fosters open communication between teachers and parents. No more waiting for report cards to know how a student is doing; everyone can stay informed and engaged.

2. Customization and Flexibility

Traditional grading systems often force schools into rigid 10-point scales. Online gradebooks break free from this mold, offering the flexibility to customize grading criteria and assessments. This innovation is especially beneficial for charter schools, which may have unique academic standards. Schools can create grading scales to reflect their assessment systems accurately, leading to a more personalized and fair educational experience.

3. Real-time Updates

Gone are the days of waiting for progress reports. Online gradebooks provide real-time access and updates for parents and students. With traditional paper systems, everyone had to wait for the following report to see grades and feedback. Now, online gradebooks allow parents and students to log in anytime to view:

• Teacher feedback

This transparency leads to better communication and keeps everyone on the same page regarding academic progress.

4. Data-driven Decision Making

Online grading systems offer a wealth of data and analytics for educators to uncover:

• Areas for improvement

By analyzing this data, schools can make informed decisions about curriculum adjustments, teaching methods, and student support initiatives. These data-driven decisions lead to a more effective and personalized student educational experience.

5. Streamlined Communications

Online gradebooks streamline communication between educators, students, and parents. Educators ensure that everyone stays informed and engaged by effortlessly sharing:

• Assignment specifics
• Grading criteria
• Constructive feedback

This transparent communication fosters a supportive learning environment and strengthens the bond between schools and families.

6. Integration With School Management Systems

Online gradebook platforms often seamlessly integrate with existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) or School Management Systems (SMS). This integration creates a cohesive educational ecosystem, allowing educators to align the following with the LMS:

• Assessments

This centralizes all academic activities and streamlines processes for everyone involved.

7. Promoting Accountability and Responsibility

Online grading systems empower students to take responsibility for their learning journey. With the ability to review their grades and assignments, students are motivated to:

• Establish objectives
• Monitor their advancement
• Reach out for extra assistance when necessary

This cultivation of responsibility nurtures a proactive mindset towards learning.

8. Efficiency and Cost Savings

One of the benefits of online gradebooks is that they have the potential to enhance efficiency and save money for schools. By simplifying the grading process and offering immediate access for parents and students, teachers can allocate more time to teaching and less to administrative duties. This can also lead to cost savings for schools, as they may need fewer staff members to manage grading and reporting.

25 Best AI-Powered Online Grading System Options

1. EssayGrader

Essaygrader is the most accurate AI grading platform, trusted by over 60,000 educators. It cuts grading time from 10 minutes to 30 seconds. Features include:

• Custom rubrics
• Bulk uploads
• AI detectors
• Used at all educational levels

2. Gradescope

A versatile application by Turnitin for grading and analyzing assessments. It supports the following:

• Online assignments
• Programming
• Bubble sheets

Students can upload work for evaluation.

3. Zipgrade

A mobile app for scanning and grading multiple-choice tests. Teachers can:

• Print answer sheets
• Create custom keys
• Share reports with students and parents

4. Co-Grader

AI-guided grading system for work imported from Google Classroom. It supports rubric-based grading and allows teachers to define criteria using templates.

Popular LMS with real-time assessment features. Automatically grades student assessments and provides detailed reports and analytics dashboards.

AI Grader evaluates essays based on the following:

• Plagiarism detection
• Grammar checking
• Readability

Offers feedback and suggestions, highlighting errors and improvements.

7. MagicSchool

Offers over 60 tools for educators , including a Rubric Generator and Diagnostic Assessment Generator for multiple-choice assessments.

Provides over 100 educational resources, including assessment tools. Offers “lesson seeds” with resources to enhance lesson plans, including:

9. ClassCompanion

AI tool that assesses student writing and provides real-time feedback. It helps teachers identify areas for improvement and track progress.

10. Feedback Studio

By Turnitin, offers a range of feedback tools, including:

• Drag-and-drop “QuickMarks”
• Voice comments
• Automatic grammar checking

Annotations and rubrics help focus feedback.

11. EnglightenAI

It syncs with Google Classroom to provide quick feedback. This allows teachers to train the AI to understand their grading scale and pedagogical focus.

12. Graded Pro

Fully integrated with Google Classroom, it automates the retrieval of student submissions and offers AI-assisted grading for various subjects.

13. Happy Grader

Created by a veteran teacher, it uses pattern recognition for grading exams and provides predictive scoring and feedback for paragraph responses.

14. Timely Grader

It streamlines grading from rubric creation to grade pass-back. It offers explanations for AI grading suggestions and provides personalized feedback for students.

15. Kangaroo AI Essay Grader

In beta mode, it offers instant grading with customizable rubrics. It provides 24/7 support through an AI assistant and ensures data safety.

An advanced system that gives detailed grading evaluations and personalized feedback. It offers comprehensive reports on student performance.

17. Coursebox

All-in-one platform with AI capabilities for creating and grading courses. Suitable for students of all levels.

AI-assisted tool for checking open-ended questions and providing detailed feedback.

19. ChatGPT

It can be used for grading with customized models for exams and essays. It offers detailed feedback and tips for improvement.

Provides immediate feedback and suggestions for improvement. It is suitable for essays, short texts, and math exams.

21. Progressay

Ideal for a hands-off approach. It grades assignments and highlights errors in the following:

• Sentence structure

22. Marking.ai

A comprehensive tool for creating and grading assignments. Promises to save significant time each week.

23. Crowdmark

It allows students to scan assignments for online grading. It offers tools like annotations and comment libraries for efficient grading.

Gradebook collects grades from all course activities. Provides automatic grading for quizzes and customizable scales for manual grading.

25. Edmentum

Grading service with qualified assistants to grade and provide detailed feedback. Frees up teachers’ time for teaching.

What Is the Role of Teachers in an AI-Driven Grading Environment

Co-Designing Learning Experiences

In the AI age, teachers aren’t just dispensers of knowledge. They’re co-designers of learning experiences . AI tools can help students explore their passions while nurturing problem-solving and critical thinking. By integrating AI into lesson plans, educators empower students to connect with real-world scenarios and build the skills they need for the future.

Curating AI-Driven Content: The New Role of Teachers

AI is everywhere, offering an overwhelming amount of educational content. Teachers become curators, selecting and adapting AI-generated materials to suit their students' needs. They ensure content aligns with academic goals and encourages deep understanding. By sifting through AI resources, educators can tailor instruction to learners' strengths and interests.

Embracing Collaboration: Teachers as Partners in Learning

AI brings new chances for teamwork and collaboration. Educators now act as facilitators, connecting students with external organizations and experts. These collaborative experiences teach students valuable skills like teamwork and adaptability. At the same time, teachers must be learners, continuously growing alongside their students and modeling the importance of curiosity.

Building Learning Communities: The Human Touch in the Digital Age

Human connection is more crucial than ever in a world dominated by technology. Teachers create supportive environments by fostering relationships with students and nurturing their emotional well-being. AI can provide personalized feedback , but it’s the face-to-face interactions that genuinely make a difference. Educators build communities where students feel valued and motivated to learn.

Preparing Students for AI-Driven Careers: A New Educational Focus

As AI transforms industries, students need new skills to succeed. Teachers help them develop:

• Critical thinking
• Ethical decision-making

Educators incorporate AI into the curriculum to help students understand its societal impacts and become responsible users and creators.

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Is AI-Assisted Grading a Magic Wand or a Pandora’s Box?

Imagine giving your students a finance problem set and having an AI grading system quickly assess their numerical responses. The AI would deliver immediate feedback, letting students correct mistakes and learn in real-time. 

This process frees you to focus on complex and subjective tasks, like guiding struggling students or designing engaging activities. AI can assess grammar and coherence in writing courses, enabling you to concentrate on more advanced aspects like argumentation. 

The Risks of Overreliance on AI Grading

While AI can handle structured tasks, it struggles with nuanced assignments. Take a strategic management course. When students create a business strategy , they apply:

• Contextual understanding

These elements are often beyond the reach of AI, which might offer superficial or formulaic feedback. Relying too much on AI could undermine learning and erode trust between students and teachers.

Bias and Fairness Concerns

AI grading systems are only as good as the data they're trained on. If a system learns from a biased sample, it can perpetuate or amplify existing inequities. For instance, an AI trained mainly on business plans from male-led startups might unfairly penalize projects addressing women’s challenges. This bias can hinder the development of strategic thinking skills needed for leadership. 

Responsible Use of AI in Education

To harness AI’s power responsibly:

• Use it to complement human judgment , not replace it.
• Protect student privacy by anonymizing data and using secure tools.
• Be transparent with students about AI’s role in grading.
• Regularly audit the AI for accuracy and fairness.
• Adjust practices based on student outcomes and feedback. 

These principles help you leverage AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks.

5 Tips for Grading Ethically With AI

1. Clarity and Openness: Be Transparent with Students

Transparency is essential when integrating AI into grading. Start by adding a detailed AI statement to your syllabus. Explain to students that AI assists in grading but doesn't replace your evaluation. Make it clear that AI offers more comprehensive and timely feedback, enhancing the learning experience. Encourage students to provide feedback on this grading method and assure them of a safe space to ask questions or voice concerns. 

Here's a sample statement for your syllabus:

" In this course, AI is encouraged for certain tasks with attribution: You can use AI tools to brainstorm assignments or revise work. I will use AI to assist in evaluating work against rubrics, identifying strengths or areas needing growth, and providing feedback. Rest assured, I review all work and feedback personally. If you have questions about AI's role in grading or need a second evaluation, feel free to reach out. "

2. Consistency is Key: Grade Against a Rubric

A rubric brings consistency to grading and sets clear expectations. When using AI for grading, input the rubric first, asking AI to measure success against these criteria. Teach students to self-assess their work using AI, empowering them to take charge of their learning. Always allow students to request a reevaluation of their work. This practice shows you care and are willing to address any concerns. Invite students to request a manual reevaluation or additional help if needed.

3. Quality Control: Ensure Quality of Feedback—Every Time

AI can be a fantastic tool, but it's not infallible. Review and edit AI-generated feedback to ensure it is accurate and relevant, and be cautious of potential biases within AI systems. To mitigate bias, test specific prompts beforehand and input your evaluative measures. For example, instead of asking the AI to "Determine whether this essay is well written," input your rubric and say: "Evaluate this essay using the rubric provided. Determine strengths and areas for improvement based on the rubric points."

4. Prioritize Learning: Focus on Feedback Over Letter Grades

AI tools can help analyze patterns in student work, but assigning letter grades isn't recommended. Traditional grading is subjective, and AI cannot assess skill mastery. Instead, use AI to produce qualitative feedback. 

Alternative grading methods can prioritize feedback over letter grades. When adopting inclusive grading approaches, students can help create rubrics or assignments, fostering a more equitable learning environment.

5. Seek Input: Run It by Your Colleagues

If you need clarification on whether AI-assisted grading is ethical , open a dialogue with colleagues. Bring it up in meetings or ask your department head for their thoughts. Consider questions like:

• Does AI-assisted grading align with our institution's policies?
• Is grading with AI equitable?
• Do its benefits outweigh ethical concerns?

Your colleagues' insights can help gauge whether AI is appropriate in your setting. Ask yourself: Will AI help me serve my students better? Will it enhance or diminish learning?

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Save Time While Grading Schoolwork with EssayGrader's Grading Software for Teachers

Imagine cutting down essay grading time from 10 minutes to just 30 seconds. EssayGrader delivers this efficiency boost while maintaining accuracy. Trusted by 60,000 educators globally, it saves teachers countless hours. This AI tool lets teachers:

• Replicate their grading rubrics
• Set up custom criteria and more

The result is high-quality, specific, and accurate feedback delivered in seconds. What would you do with all that extra time?

Replicate and Customize Your Grading Rubrics

Why start from scratch when you can use what you already have? EssayGrader allows teachers to replicate their existing grading rubrics, so the AI doesn’t have to guess the criteria. You can also set up custom rubrics, ensuring grades align perfectly with your expectations. This flexibility means you can tailor the grading experience to fit any assignment.

Grade Essays by Class and Bulk Upload

Handling essays for an entire class can be overwhelming, but EssayGrader streamlines the process. You can grade essays by class, making organizing and managing your workload easy. The bulk upload feature lets you add multiple essays simultaneously, saving you even more time. Spend less time organizing and more time teaching.

Catch Essays Written by AI With Our Detector

In an age where AI can write essays, ensuring students submit their work is essential. EssayGrader includes an AI detector to catch essays written by machines. This feature gives you peace of mind, knowing that the job you’re grading is original. Protect academic integrity without adding to your workload.

Summarize Essays Quickly and Easily

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Jekyll and Hyde: A* Grade / L9 vs A Grade / L7 Example Essays + Feedback

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

8 September 2024

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A MEGA REVISION 'JEKYLL AND HYDE' BUNDLE! (Digital + Printable PDFs, PPTs and worksheets!)

This bundle contains everything you need to teach or study Stevenson's novella 'The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' in the form of digital and printable PDF documents. It’s perfect for students aged 14+. **This bundle is currently available at a 50% discount! ** Preview this document for free, to check whether the whole bundle is right for you [Jekyll and Hyde: Character Breakdown / Analysis](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110830) With this bundle, students will be able to: * Understand the structural elements and key moments of the plot * Deepen their knowledge of characters, including understanding the deeper messages behind each one * Integrate the significance of the setting into their analyses and interpretations of the play as a whole * Memorise a range of carefully chosen key quotations for use in essays and analysis * Develop their language, structure and form analysis skills, with guided support and examples * Identify and analyse the thematic and contextual details * Learn approaches to a range of essay question types: discursive, argumentative, close reading * Become confident with extract interpretation and analysis * Develop their knowledge of tragic conventions and apply them to the novella * Expand their critical aptitude via exposure to key critical frameworks and critics’ quotations (for higher-level students) * Write their essays on Jekyll and Hyde, after support with planning help and example A* / top grade model answers Reasons to love this bundle: * Downloadable PDF documents, graphically designed to a high level, PowerPoints (ppts) and worksheets * Visual aids (photographs and drawings) to support learning * Organised categories that simplify the text for students * Print and digital versions - perfect for any learning environment * The unit has everything you need to start teaching or learning - starting with the basic story summary, going right up to deep contextual and critical wider readings * Lots of tasks and opportunities to practice literary analysis skills - students will be guided through writing a literary analysis response to the novella -This is what you’ll get with this bundle: (each document includes digital + printable revision guide + PowerPoint + worksheet)- THE COMPLETE JEKYLL AND HYDE COURSE: 1. [Character Analysis / Breakdown](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110830) 2. [Plot Summary / Breakdown](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110836) 3. [Context Analysis](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110842) 4. [Genre](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110856) 5. [Key Quotations](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110868) 6. [Narrative Voice](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110978) 7. [Setting](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110874) 8. [Themes](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110893) 9. [Critical Interpretation / Critics' Quotations](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110848) 10. [Essay Help](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110934) 11. [Essay Planning](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110950) 12. [PEE Paragraph Practise](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110997) 13. [Essay Practise (Gothic Atmosphere)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110962) 14. [L9 / A* Grade vs L7 / A Grade Example Essays + Feedback (Frightening Outsider)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110990) 15. [L9 / A* Grade Essay Example (Tension and Mystery)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110904) 16. [L8 / A Grade Essay Example + Feedback (Unnatural and Threatening)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110972) 17. [L6 / B Grade Essay Example + Feedback (Suspicious Atmosphere)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110984) 18. [L4 / C Grade Essay Example (Secrecy and Reputation)](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110923) 19. [Study Questions / Exercises](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13110884) 20. [Essay Questions + Passage-based Questions](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-13111001) Please review our content! We always value feedback and are looking for ways to improve our resources, so all reviews are more than welcome. Check out our [shop](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/Scrbbly) here.

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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: "my grade is wrong": a contestable ai framework for interactive feedback in evaluating student essays.

Abstract: Interactive feedback, where feedback flows in both directions between teacher and student, is more effective than traditional one-way feedback. However, it is often too time-consuming for widespread use in educational practice. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have potential for automating feedback, they struggle with reasoning and interaction in an interactive setting. This paper introduces CAELF, a Contestable AI Empowered LLM Framework for automating interactive feedback. CAELF allows students to query, challenge, and clarify their feedback by integrating a multi-agent system with computational argumentation. Essays are first assessed by multiple Teaching-Assistant Agents (TA Agents), and then a Teacher Agent aggregates the evaluations through formal reasoning to generate feedback and grades. Students can further engage with the feedback to refine their understanding. A case study on 500 critical thinking essays with user studies demonstrates that CAELF significantly improves interactive feedback, enhancing the reasoning and interaction capabilities of LLMs. This approach offers a promising solution to overcoming the time and resource barriers that have limited the adoption of interactive feedback in educational settings.

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