Grading
This is a report on the discussion that took place in the class of
CSE590IT on 16th October 2001. The class started by Tammy posing a
question has to what is the relevance of grading in any course. The
answers given by various people were:
- It is in some sense, another communication mechanism with the students.
A student can look at whether he/she is in place with whats happenning
in the class. Similarly a teacher can see whether he/she is able to
get the level of students or not.
- This further helps the teacher to adjust the course material according
to the measured understanding of the students in the test. Hence grading
is a great tool for learning.
- At the same time, it tells the students where they stand and whether
they need to work more or are there topics that they thought they
understood but have actually not!
- Grade, is a motivation for working. It in some sense, provides a certain
challenge to various interested students to toil harder.
On this discussion, one of the students pointed out that many of the
things pointed out above can better be done without the grades. Rather
one should minimize grading (in this case giving points to students'
work). Instead, one can write comments, both explanatory or positively
reinforcing, on their answer sheets. This would avoid explicit use
of points and thus a certain stratification in the students and at
the same time may motivate them for further work as well.
Later a lot of practical issues which come across while grading papers
were discussed. Here is a list of prominent of them:
- There is a trade off between the amount of time consumed in each paper
and the quality of grading. A better grade paper would entail writing
of a lot of comments at appropriate portions so that they can be beneficial
and motivating for the students. Moreover, when they see the teacher
putting in time they are motivated to put in more time. On this some
TA's argued that requires a lot of time utilization. Rather, one can
do it many other ways to the students who are seriously interested
say in office hours etc. More it was discussed that it makes more
sense to not write errors in each answer explicitly but to write up
an umbrella of sample solution. This would not only have the right
answers but also address to some common errors noted in the papers
and the problems in different approaches.
- Another interesting question that arose was whether to grade only
for the quality of work or the efforts also. It was further argues
that in checking the codes it is mostly not even possible to judge
the efforts by scanning through the code or from its length so this
notion of grading efforts is even more complex.
- Also it was mentioned that a general higher is probably not a good
idea as it may take the motivation away.
- A lot of TA's expressed fears on students constantly pestering the
TA's for better points. On that it was said that one has to make them
understand that the points are a grade on their work, rather than
on their understanding or their personality.
- Another idea was that one should put the grade on front page so that
forcing the students to go through the full answer sheet.
- Another important point raised for whether to accept late submissions
or not. It was said that in larger classes it is not practical to
accept late entries. In other cases a standard late submission policy
can be implemented.
Later an activity was done in which TA's were required to grade a
piece of code. And it was observed that the grading process has a
lot of subjectivity in it as different people gave different points
for the same code.
Grading
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2001-10-21