Answer:
Ask any faculty member about how they grade their students, and they will probably explain the precise weights they give quizzes, tests, papers, labs and other factors -- as well as how they average student results over the term to determine a final grade.
Even though the scholarship, technology and pedagogy of postsecondary courses have significantly evolved in the last century, the ways students are graded has remained unchanged. This should come as no surprise, considering that most college and university faculty members receive no training in how to grade, either in graduate school or professional development on the job, and so most typically grade as they were graded. Plus, because faculty members rarely receive support to examine and learn about grading, each professor’s grading policies are filtered through their own individual beliefs about how students learn, how to motivate them and how best to describe student achievement.
As a result, grades often vary within a department and even within a course taught by different instructors. That is particularly true at community colleges, which depend heavily on part-time faculty who are rarely involved in any deep way with the department in which they teach, but it is also often the case in research institutions, where grading is often the responsibility of teaching assistants, who rarely discuss grading practice with faculty members or department chairs.
While faculty members believe that their grading practices are fair and objective, a closer look reveals that they are anything but. And while employers and other institutions rely on those grades as a reliable marker of student achievement, it might shock them to know how much grading practices reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of individual faculty members.
Explanation:
Two examples:
Frequently, faculty members incorporate into a student’s grade many highly subjective criteria -- such as a student’s “effort,” “participation” and “engagement” -- behaviors which the professor subjectively witnesses, interprets and judges through a culturally specific and biased lens.
Many faculty members grade on a curve, which makes grades dependent on the particular students in that particular classroom in that particular term. It unhelpfully describes student achievement not based on what the student learned but rather on how well they did relative to others in the class. Plus, this method translates learning into a competition, which adds stress that undermines collaboration and has been found to inhibit learning.
