David's grading diary

One week of David's uncensored thoughts about grading

It’s a stream of consciousness post!

I’ll admit it: I didn’t know what to write for the blog this week. I’ve written a lot of articles over the past 3.5 years, and occasionally I’m not sure what new ideas I can bring to the blog.

Instead, each day last week¹, I took notes about my thoughts on grading. Whatever was happening grading-wise that day, I wrote down. After the fact, I filled them out and polished them a bit.

Without further ado, here’s one week’s worth of my largely uncensored, mostly stream-of-consciousness, and absolutely honest thoughts about grading.

Monday: Keep it simple

While preparing for my geometry class, I started to think about how my assessment setup has become too complicated over the semesters.

The core assessments are simple: take-home problem sets, written and submitted through our LMS. But this is also a class where students present their work, so we have pre-class prep assignments in which students first attempt that work and can volunteer to present. Presentations are another assessment category (albeit one that I don’t grade). To give students an option to share their ideas without presenting, I also have a “Class Journal” where students can submit written work. There are also periodic check-in meetings. I’ve added each of these assignments one by one over the years, each for good reasons and with good intentions. Together they can be a lot of work, although not an unreasonable amount. But nowadays, they’ve become a lot for students to keep track of.

The real trouble comes from another item I’ve added to the class: an individualized goal system. I work with students to set personalized goals, and we periodically review them. We discuss their progress during check-in meetings, and they use their goal progress as part of an end-of-semester grade proposal. I like the idea of these goals, and students seem to find them valuable. But tracking a separate goal for each student makes a lot of extra work for me, and it is quickly becoming the straw that’s breaking my back.

Before class, I spend a few minutes reviewing daily prep assignments, including checking to see who has volunteered to present their work in class that day. Then I cross-check that against their goals (so that those whose goals are focused on presenting can get higher priority to present). In class itself, I observe presentations, team work, and other activities, always trying to take notes or remember moments that are relevant to each student’s goals. After class, I record who presented, with private notes about each presentation in terms of their goals. Then I go to find each student’s shared progress tracker sheet and add notes about their work in class, depending on their goals. When I’m reading homework, I try to keep different students’ goals in mind as I give feedback. All of this adds up to a lot to keep track of both mentally and physically, and lately I’ve been feeling like I can’t keep up with it. As valuable as these goals are, I need a way to make them more manageable for me.

In the middle of Monday’s class prep, I didn’t know how to fix all of this and didn’t have time anyway, so instead I decided to leave a note for myself in my “Notes for next time” document for this class:

It’s hard to keep track of everybody’s goals, even with individual trackers, even with 15 students. Maybe put more of this on students, less on me? How? Take this seriously, future Dave!

Future me will hopefully believe past me that this is a real issue. I’m often highly optimistic at the start of a semester and make course design decisions that future me ends up regretting. This is an especially difficult one, because I’ve seen over and over that customized goals are really valuable for students. But I also have a feeling that students might think there are a few too many things to keep track of in this class. So, I left myself another note:

Things are feeling too complex - too many assessments to keep track of, both for me and for students. Simplify – how?

We’ll see how future me handles these notes. I don’t have any answers at the moment, but for now I’m glad to have these ideas down in words so that I won’t forget them.

Tuesday: Be ready to recognize learning when it happens

Today during an office hour, a student brought some questions about a homework problem they’d had a lot of difficulty with. They had previously submitted a solution, and I’d given feedback indicating some significant changes were needed. Before the office hour, they had outlined a new solution and brought some questions about it. I asked some questions in return, and they were easily able to answer them. During that back-and-forth discussion, I realized that my student understood the new solution thoroughly and was able to fully defend their logic. By my policies, they would need to then revise their original written solution and resubmit it for grading. But did I really need to see it written out once more? Our discussion was a revision on its own.

So I said as much: “This is great. You’ve convinced me; you’re at Successful now.”

It was a good reminder to be aware of the many different ways students can demonstrate their understanding, sometimes even in a different format than expected. It was also a reminder that those course policies are there to show me what students understand — and if they’ve already shown me their understanding, I don’t have to force compliance with an unnecessary policy.

Wednesday: A flexible rubric

I’ve been grading homework today², which got me thinking about the rubric I use in a lot of my classes. Over time I’ve developed a core rubric with four levels that have these general descriptions:

Exemplary - Successful, plus especially clear, thorough, or otherwise notable.

Successful - Correct, complete, and demonstrates a thorough understanding of the relevant topics with at most minor errors that are not central to the topics.

Revisable - Leaves a question open in my mind about the student’s understanding, but if the student is able to clear it up, it will become Successful.

New attempt needed or sometimes Not yet - A significant error that is central to the topic, an important omission, or so many minor errors that it leaves understanding in doubt.

For each class I add details – specifications – that are specific to that class.

This rubric is inspired by the EMRF and EMRN rubrics, but with my own particular tweaks. Here are some things I do with it, and why I especially like it:

• The Revisable level is especially valuable. In classes with longer-form writing or projects, it works as you would expect: Students can (and should!) continue to refine their work and resubmit revisions in future weeks. In more skills-based classes, students who earn New attempt needed usually need to complete wholly new questions on a future quiz or exam. Sometimes that feels like overkill. If I’m uncertain about a student’s level of understanding – especially where a “quick fix” might be all that’s needed to show their actual understanding – I use Revisable. Students who earn Revisable can come to my office and explain what went wrong and how to fix it. If they convince me, then the mark is upgraded to Successful for free, with no new attempt required. If not, I can easily pivot to helping them understand. This saves both students and me time and helps ensure that students who need help make it to office hours. It also helps address a common student complaint that marks are “all or nothing” or “too harsh”, especially in the presence of a relatively minor error.³

• In more writing-focused classes, I drop the Not yet mark entirely and use only Revisable to indicate work that doesn’t meet my specifications. In the case that a student doesn’t submit work at all, submits incomplete work, or submits something that doesn’t appear to be a good-faith effort, I call that Incomplete.

• In some classes – especially more introductory classes – I find the Exemplary mark to be distracting. I want students to focus on learning skills thoroughly – that’s Successful – but they can sometimes be distracted by the shiny glow of Exemplary. In these classes, I remove Exemplary entirely. If a student’s work is especially clear or otherwise notable, I let them know through my feedback or a personal comment.

What all of this means is that I typically have a 3-level rubric, either Exemplary, Successful, Revisable, or else Successful, Revisable, New attempt needed. For me, these marks make grading choices quick and easy, leaving me more time to focus on helpful feedback.

Thursday: Customized challenges

When I grade longer-form written work (like proofs, essays, or project reports), I grade with specifications for Successful in mind. If a student reaches that level but their work isn’t Exemplary (and if I’m using an Exemplary mark at all), I’ll usually give some general feedback and encourage them to ask for more detailed “level 2” feedback. This saves me a lot of time on fundamentally correct work that the student may not be interested in revising. Often the “level 2” feedback contains details of notation, grammar, structure, and flow. But sometimes there’s something else required.

Today while responding to a “level 2 feedback” request, I realized that there weren’t any of those kinds of details keeping it from being Exemplary – it just wasn’t the best work that this student could do (it helped that this was a 400-level elective class, so I knew the student and their work very well). Instead, I wrote this in an email: “My challenge to you is to make [this proof] simpler and more concise, without losing clarity. That's what this one needs to be exemplary.” The student seemed energized by that challenge — I knew that was likely to happen — and I soon had a new and beautifully simple proof to read.

I realized that I really like the idea of making customized challenges, based on what I’ve noticed about a student’s overall level of work, to reach the highest level of accomplishment. I would only use this for Exemplary comments – something that goes above and beyond the specifications required for Successful, and also something that isn’t required to pass the course – because I want the specifications for Successful to be as clear as possible to all students. In the right circumstances, a custom-tailored challenge is a great way to motivate and encourage students.

Friday: The value of not having grades

I teach some classes without assigning any kind of “marks” on assignments. Instead, I give detailed feedback, and have opportunities for students to revise and then get more feedback. Students meet with me periodically to discuss their actual grade progress (some might call this ungrading or collaborative grading). I recently did an anonymous survey of students in one such class.

On one question, “What is something that is working for you in this class?”, I received an unusual reply. Paraphrased, it said that the student appreciated not having a grade that indicated they were fully correct. They liked being offered confirmation on good work and constructive criticism on how to improve the rest, even in already solid work. They thought an actual grade might cause them to stop thinking about their work since it was “good enough”, even if there was more they could do to improve it.

Even more interestingly, they also said that while they often felt like they would rather complain about having to do the work of improvement, the lack of a grade also made them feel incentivized to write stronger proofs. The student recognized that their own initial reaction wasn’t necessarily the best for their learning.

Students have a complicated relationship with grades of all types, and this response was a good reminder about why sometimes it’s a good idea to remove those incentives. I’ve also been wavering back and forth lately about my choice to make this class gradeless — maybe it would be easier just to add some marks? — and this felt like a bit of validation for me.

Final thoughts

It was fun to keep a “grading diary” for a week. I think I’ll keep doing this, both as a way to generate ideas for this blog, and as part of my own reflective practice as a teacher.

One thing that these notes highlighted to me was my rollercoaster of emotions about grading over the course of the week: On Monday I was feeling overwhelmed by my choices in one class, but by Friday I was feeling a warm glow from student comments in the exact same class. Part of that might be because this week was right before our spring break, a time when the school year is wearing on all of us. But it’s also a good reminder that my feelings in the moment are not always representative of my more sober thoughts when I have time to sit back and reflect. Keeping notes and looking back over them helps me sort the wheat from the chaff.

Do you have an idea for a Grading for Growth guest post – perhaps your own grading diary? We would love to hear it! Just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you:

1. OK, it was actually two weeks ago – last week was our spring break.

2. I use “homework” to mean longer, more involved problem sets or writing assignments. This is not work done purely for practice.

3. Note that truly minor errors typically lead to Successful anyhow — as long as they aren’t important enough or prevalent enough to mask a student’s actual understanding.