Welcome to the Tuesday Teaching Tip. Each week, the Faculty Collaborative will bring you an easy-to-implement tool that you can use immediately in your classroom teaching. The goals of these tips will be to broaden your teaching toolbox, share resources on teaching, and alert you to upcoming teaching and learning opportunities from the Faculty Collaborative.

TUESDAY TEACHING TIP: Grading–Good for them and good for you?

This week, we challenge you to think about your grading practices. While grading we sometimes focus on correcting or even editing students’ answers, which may not help our students learn and is both tiresome and time-consuming for us. Alternative approaches can provide students with more constructive feedback and save us time.

Ideally, feedback on exams should be constructive to help students understand their strengths and areas for improvement. Rather than subtracting points for less-than-perfect answers without explanation, provide suggestions for how the answer could be improved. Students could be allowed to revise and resubmit their work. Offer opportunities for students to improve their work based on feedback and learn from their mistakes. Avoid extraneous factors when grading. Try to minimize the influence of factors unrelated to student learning, such as attendance, punctuality, or personal biases, on grading decisions. 

Does this sound like it will take a lot of your time? We have suggestions for how to make grading more fair, constructive, and efficient. 

Here’s one way to do it 

• Create a list of exam comments based on anonymized students’ answers. 
• Circulate the list of banked comments with your students so that everyone sees weaker and stronger responses along with your feedback.
• Make this list their future study guide for the next exam, and save time on both ends.

UPCOMING EVENT

DID YOU DO IT?

Let us know how it went? We would love to hear your feedback about how you implemented today’s Tuesday Teaching Tip in your classroom. Click here to fill out our 3-question survey.

WANT TO READ A LITTLE MORE?

• Faculty Collaborative DRT page on Exams
• University of Wisconsin-Madison Tips for grading efficiently
• Curious about “Ungrading”? Learn more here: Empowering Student Agency through Ungrading

This week’s Tuesday Teaching Tip was prepared by Sofia Kotsiri on behalf of the Faculty Collaborative.

Missed a teaching tip? Read them all here:

• Teaching Tip #1 - Reflection (January 30, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #2 - Mid-Course Evaluation (February 6, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #3 - Beyond Think-Pair-Share (February 13, 2024)