Introduction to Grading and Feedback

One of the most common tasks for a TA is to evaluate students’ work and provide feedback. There is no single correct system for grading and providing feedback for your students. There are, however, a few key principles you may want to keep in mind while grading and providing feedback.

• Great expectations: Provide your students with clear expectations and a grading scheme or rubric before they begin working on their assignments, labs, essays, quizzes, etc. Using a grading scheme also helps to ensure consistency between different students and different graders.
• Feedback for the future: Try to provide clear feedback for your students, not just assigning a grade. Tell them what they did well and what they can improve for the future. Ongoing feedback is important for effective learning.
• Question by question: When grading an exam or assignment, it is best to grade the same question on all exams/assignments before moving on to the next. If you are splitting the work between TAs, consider dividing the grading by question instead of students to ensure consistency.
• Range finding: Review the work of a few students before you begin grading to help establish what each grade level looks like.
• Avoid bias: Consider hiding students’ names when grading and assigning marks. When providing more detailed feedback, however, it can then be helpful to look at their name so you can connect to previous work and the student’s development.
• Take a break: Take regular breaks while grading to ensure you don’t get burnt out. Being tired can lead to unfair grading practices for some students but not others.
• Learning together: Discuss common errors with the entire class. This saves time, emphasizes important points, and shows that everyone needs feedback to learn.
• Consider your tone: You want to ensure you are helping students learn and not just criticizing or being hurtful. Provide feedback that you would want to receive which is encouraging and constructive.
• Comment banks save time: Keep a list of common feedback and comments you can copy and paste from.
• Focus your feedback: You may not have time to provide feedback on everything you would like to. Select the most important points and focus on these. You can also refer students to resources from the library for help.
• Streamline spelling suggestions: Circle repeated errors only once, providing detailed feedback, and then instruct the students to look for this error throughout their work instead of circling mistakes each time.

Effective feedback is like a GPS for your students.

Receiving an assignment back with little feedback can be frustrating for all students, including those that did very well on the assignments. When giving feedback, the acronym GPS can be a helpful guide:

Now it’s your turn! Check out the complementary activities to reflect on how you can provide effective feedback for your students this semester.

Adapted From:

• GPS: Learn This Simple Acronym to Help Give Students Better Feedback.

Additional Resources:

• 5 Research-Based Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback
• Receiving and Giving Effective Feedback. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.
• Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools. (2010). Government of Ontario.