Grading

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Usually when I think back on bad grading experiences, I think back to my high school history teacher. Since I used this example so often already, I will switch it up and talk about my college lab teacher. The class I took with this teacher was all lab based; there was no lecture. However, the teacher would often utilize the first 30-60 minutes reading off of a PowerPoint in the front of the lab class. There were some external factors that made it difficult to learn in that room that the teacher had no control over: there was a constant hum of machines and a vent that often over-powered her voice. What she could control, though, was how she taught and how clear she was about objectives. My teacher read off the PowerPoint slides word for word in a monotonous tone, never pausing at the end of sentences nor adding any emphasis to any part of sentences. The way she spoke put half of the class to sleep on any given day and motivated the other half to use this time to work on assignments for other classes. We would have a quiz every few weeks based on what we learned on class but the quiz outline was not clear on what we had to know. My best friend and I (along with the majority of the class) received 50s-60s on these quizzes. This experience reminds me of the experiences in the article. One of the teachers recall that they had an unfair physics class because the students didn’t know what to expect on the tests (Guskey, 2006).

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Although I’ve had a few negative experiences with grading, I’ve also had positive ones. My most positive experience was in organic chemistry. According to student gossip, I had the most difficult teacher and it would be nearly impossible to get an A. I was motivated by the challenge and I put my all into the class. My teacher, unlike the other teachers, went into very deep detail about every organic chemistry topic. She expected us to know even the slightest details and put arrows showing movement of every positive and negative charge. She also gave very detailed study guides. This was a positive grading experience for me because the teacher was challenging but very clear about her expectations. In the article, one of the students had a similar experience as they reported about a teacher that “expected a lot, but showed us how to meet his expectations” (Guskey, 2006).  

I want to use my past experiences to help shape me into a fair grader. I want to be clear about my expectations towards my students by providing detailed rubrics and study guides. I also want to utilize my class time as well as I can by providing engaging lessons while speaking in a clear, enthusiastic voice. To prevent from bias, I want to use by rubrics to grade student work as objectively as possible. If it helps, I could grade the assessments while covering the name of the student to assure that I don’t act on any assumptions I have of how well my students should have done.

                                                   

Reference

Guskey, T. R. (2006). "It Wasn't Fair!" Educators' Recollections of Their Experiences as Students with Grading. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.