Grading Expectations

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Grading Expectations

When teaching online, some instructors feel the need to significantly increase the amount of graded assignments to more closely assess student learning.  While ongoing knowledge checks can be a sound strategy, if you have to manually review each one it can lead to grading overload.  The Quizzes tool in Canvas provides options for automatically graded knowledge checks.

The SpeedGrader tool in Canvas can help streamline your grading workflow. In SpeedGrader you review and comment on the assignment within Canvas.  You can leave comments on the paper directly and/or you can leave summative comments to the side. Summative comments can be text but they can also be audio or video. If a student misses a step in an equation, it's easier to show them what they did wrong than to explain it in text.

Another useful tool when grading is the Mute Assignment function.  This allows you to grade without students seeing their grades and comments until you are ready to release grades to the entire class. Without muting the assignment your students will receive a notification that their assignment is graded as soon as you enter the grade and move on to the next student, which can be problematic if you decide later in the roster that you need to make a grade adjustment. You can mute or unmute an assignment in SpeedGrader Links to an external site. or in the Gradebook Links to an external site.. Once you are done grading, unmute the assignment and your students will get a notification that grades have been released.  

Rubrics

Rubrics are both assessment tools for faculty and learning tools for students that can ease anxiety about the grading process for both parties. Creating rubrics does require a substantial time investment up front, but this process will result in reduced time spent grading or explaining assignment criteria down the road.

Research indicates that rubrics:

  • Encourage students to think critically by linking assignments with learning objectives.
  • Increase transparency and consistency in grading by helping to normalize the work of multiple graders such as across multiple sections of a course or with TAs sharing grading tasks in large courses.
  • Reduce student concerns about subjectivity or arbitrariness in grading.
  • Increase the efficiency of grading by reducing the time you spend grading assignments and supporting the provision of timely feedback which has a positive impact on the learning process.
  • Support formative assessment when coupled with other forms of feedback (e.g., brief, individualized comments) to show students how to improve.
  • Enhance quality of self- and peer-assessment by giving students a clear sense of what constitutes different levels of performance.

The Rubric Tool in Canvas Links to an external site. is an easy way to both share rubrics with your students and speed up your grading.  Once you create a rubric for the assignment, that rubric will appear in SpeedGrader Links to an external site. where you can click on the rating the student earned for each category, adjust points within a points range for that rating, and make comments specifically to that criteria.

Here are some example rubrics to help you think about what you might write for your own class.

Other Grading Options

In some courses, an easy way to speed up grading is to develop a bank of comments.  When you have taught a course multiple times, you know the common errors and misconceptions that occur.  To save re-typing basically the same comment over and over, save the comment either with your answer key or in a more general comment file for the module or course and then copy and paste it in, personalizing it as needed.  For more suggestions on streamlining grading, see Ten Tips for More Efficient and Effective Grading Links to an external site..