Handbook Highlight- Grading Overview

Grading Overview

Provide Meaningful Feedback to Students

• 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.

Maintain Grading Consistency within a Content Area

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to parents and students in your course.
• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your students and parents.

Minimize Student Complaints about Grading

• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus/outline. Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.
• Avoid modifying your policies, including those on late work, once you have communicated them to students.
• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focus on course learning goals.
• Use Aeries and remind students when Aeries is updated so parents and students can track their progress.