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Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices |Teaching with Technology| Sample Course Evaluation Forms

Teaching Tools

2. Teaching Practices

2.3. Feedback and Grading

Developing Grading Criteria

Use grading criteria to help:

• Clarify the assignments for students
• Clarify the assignments for yourself
• You decide which writing features to emphasize in class
• Students evaluate their own work
• Students focus on particular features of their writing
• Students gain experience in evaluating someone else's writing
• Students gain practice in using the criteria on someone else's paper
• Students develop a framework to use for other writing assignments

After reading through the written assignment

• Identify the goals
  • What are your goals or objectives?
  • What do you expect students to learn by completing this assignment?
  • What kinds of intellectual skills do you expect them to practice or acquire by completing this assignment?
  • Are your goals for students, in terms of their learning, explicit?

It's generally better to explicitly state the goals, unless you have a specific reason why you don't want to (e.g., it's the end of the semester and you want to see if your students will automatically transfer the skills that they've used on other assignments to this new one).

SAMPLE-Explicit Statement of Learning Goals: This assignment has been designed to help you gain experience with the most typical writing required of graduates of this field, proposal writing.

My goals for you include:

• Learn the components of a proposal
• Learn to write an effective problem statement, one that limits the size of your proposal and suggests the criteria by which your proposal should be evaluated
• Identify and argue convincingly for a particular solution
• Design an effective and realistic timeline for the stages of the proposal
• Be able to anticipate the reader's concerns and objections, and take those into account when writing your proposal
• Be able to read proposals written by others and give specific feedback about their effectiveness
• Work effectively in teams to gather information

Notice that some of these learning goals are specific to the proposal assignment, and others are things that the student is expected to learn in the process of completing the assignment.

• Think about what are the essential elements
  • At this point, rather than focusing on what is desirable, just think about what must be included.
  • Is there a range (for instance, of citations or examples) that you would find acceptable? If so, can you specify the range?
  • Is there a rule of thumb that you'd like for them to apply?
  • What are the features you are most concerned about?
• Some possibilities include:
  • General Items
    • Organization
    • Logic
    • Use of transitions
    • Clear title
    • Appropriate punctuation
    • Supporting evidence, including examples
    • Supporting evidence, including citations
  • Particular to the Assignment
  • Explanation of cause/effect relationship
  • Historical analysis
  • Recognition of the needs of a particular audience (for example, business audience)
  • Incorporating a particular viewpoint or perspective into the argument
  • Effectively consider the constraints imposed by building on this particular site
  • Discipline-specific
  • Features relevant to a chemistry lab write-up:
    • Summary of experiment being conducted
    • Material and equipment used
    • Method section
    • Results
    • Discussion
  • Features relevant to a marketing proposal
    • Statement of problem
    • Identification of target population or audience
    • Thumbnail sketches and rough sketches
    • Statement of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the sketches
    • Overall assessment
• Think about where students have experienced problems with the assignment in the past
  • If you've used this assignment in the past, think about where students in the past have had problems with the assignment. Clarify to this new group of students how these problems may manifest themselves.
  • Remind students (for instance) that they need to:
  • Start early
  • Include a title
  • Include several sources from the past several years in their references
• Order the list of key features from most to least important
  • Once you have identified a list of key features, order them from most to least important.
  • Determine their ranking according to their:
  • Effects on meaning
  • Relationship to disciplinary preferences
  • Personal preferences
  • If you intend to use this set of criteria on a set of student papers, at this point you may want to share your criteria with your students.
• Use the list of key features on a sample set of student papers
  • Note difficulties or problems in applying this set of criteria. In particular, note if the grade you believe that the student has earned is not reflected in the sum of the scores you've assigned on your criteria sheet.
  • For instance, in some cases it may be that the overall "best" paper would no longer be "best" in the class if you apply your grading criteria.
  • If this is true, you will want to try to identify other features that you're using in your comprehensive evaluation that you aren't using in your criteria-based evaluation.
• Revise the list to account for problems or difficulties
  • You may need to revise the list several times to get it so that it works the way that you want it to.
  • When you're done, your overall assessment should be reflected in the individual rankings you give to specific features.
  • A paper that receives a high score should also be one that you find well written.
• Assign weights or values to the items on the revised list
  • Now that you have a general sense that your criteria and your overall assessment are well-aligned, it's time to assign weights to each of the key features.
  • Write up your criteria sheet so that its easy for students to see what you most value (and that will most positively effect their final grade).
• Find models for the key features
  • Try to identify and share models that are appropriate given the skill levels of your students. If appropriate:
  • Find sections (or occasionally an entire paper) that can serve as models for the key features
  • Include models of varying levels
• Share these criteria with students
  • Some instructors give these criteria out to students at the same time that they assign the grade. Other instructors, who think that criteria sheets are too confining (or that they may give students the opportunity to haggle over points) prefer to include an "other" category in addition to their various criteria.
  • In any case, explain to students how to use these criteria sheets to help shape their writing. Give them back to students when you return a paper, as a way of assessing their final score and their progress in mastering the material in the course.

Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University