Grading Fairly and Consistently

As a GA/TA you may be spending a lot of your time evaluating student assignments. Therefore, it is important that you take appropriate measures to grade fairly and consistently, while staying within your contract hours. Below are strategies to help:

Use a rubric or marking guide

Rubrics outline assessment criteria and specify the knowledge and/or skills students should demonstrate. Not only do they provide transparency to students, but they can also speed up grading for GA/TAs and offer rationale if grade disagreements arise. Course instructors are typically responsible for creating rubrics so if you don’t receive one, ask for one. If there are no rubrics, ask the course instructor if you can develop one together.

Grade the same question, task, or topic all at one time

Use a systematic approach to grading by assessing the same question/topic/or problem all at once before moving to a different grading task. This will help ensure grading is more consistent as you are likely to remember when to deduct grades, will save you time, and may also help you to detect academic dishonesty issues.

Grade with GA/TA Peers

If multiple GA/TAs are grading the same assignment, it can be helpful to work in the same room together so that you can ask one another questions and compare feedback. You may even want to collectively grade one assignment together, or with the course instructor, to serve as a benchmark.

Remove students’ names

Blind grading helps you to grade fairly and not based on the student who submits the assignment. You can do this by not looking at students’ names when grading online, or for hard copies of assignments, you can simply cover students’ names.

Practice and ask for advice

As you begin grading, you will get more comfortable with the process. If you are unsure about something, ask another GA/TA that you work with, or the course instructor to review a sample of your grading.

Take a break

It is easy to get tired while grading. Schedule regular breaks to ensure you don’t get burnt out.

Use a timer

Depending on how many hours you have been allocated for grading, you may need to mark quickly. A timer can help keep you on track for the hours that you are allotted to work and give you an estimate of how much time you can spend marking an assessment. If you are close to going over your allotted hours, be sure to discuss this with the course instructor right away.

Review your grading

If time permits, review a random sample of assignments to ensure you were consistent throughout the process.

Report common mistakes to the course instructor

As you notice common issues in student assignments, report them back to the course instructor so that they can address these issues in class. It is also good practice to provide the instructor with information about how you graded and what your process was. You may also want to provide a short summary of grade averages along with the highest/lowest grades.

GA/TA Role in Academic Integrity

Since GA/TAs do a lot of marking in the courses they are assigned to, there is a responsibility to uphold academic integrity standards. Remember, if something seems suspicious, such as similar papers or responses to questions between students, bring it to the course instructor. All matters that involve violation(s) of academic integrity should dealt with by course instructor.

Giving Effective Feedback

As a GA/TA, you may be required to provide feedback on work submitted by students; however, not all feedback is good feedback. For example, let’s think about providing feedback on a student’s paper that was submitted. If the student receives feedback that simply says “good job”, that may leave them wondering what they did that warranted that feedback. For that reason, providing detailed feedback is important for student learning and to improve on future assessments.

Characteristics of Effective Feedback

Effective feedback allows students to integrate and apply the recommendations to their own work with the intention of improving for future evaluations. Effective feedback has the following characteristics:

• Specific: Feedback should be clear and direct. It should focus on identifiable factors that a student can see, not abstract concepts or general statements. For example, if a student has provided an incorrect definition of a course topic, effective feedback should direct the student to the problem(s) with the definition.
• Descriptive: Feedback is detailed, addresses behaviour/impact, and avoids judgmental language such as good or bad.
• Behavioural: Feedback should be exclusively focused on the action or content and avoid postulating reasons for those actions. Don’t speak about personal characteristics and avoid judgmental terms.
• Balanced: Feedback should highlight both what the student did well and where the student can improve. Sandwiching critical comments between strengths can be helpful.
• Manageable: The amount of feedback given should be reasonable and can be translated into improved practice. Providing too much feedback at any one time may cause the student to become overwhelmed and limit the amount that the student will be able to act upon.
• Practical: Feedback should be able actionable and able to be effectively implemented into student work.
• Timely: Feedback should be provided in a reasonable timeframe so students can act upon it for their next assessment(s).
• Checked: Feedback is best when understood. If given an opportunity, check with students to ensure they understand the feedback, including how to improve on future assignments

Additional Resources for Grading