So, what about grading in that inverted transition-to-proofs course? Other than the midterm and final exams, which were graded pretty much as you might expect, we had four recurring assignments that required grading: Guided Practice, Quizzes, Classwork, and the Proof Portfolio. Let’s discuss the workflow and how it was all managed.
Let’s start with the easy stuff: Quizzes and Guided Practice. Quizzes were done using clickers, so the grading was trivial. Guided Practice was graded on the basis of completeness and effort only, on a scale of 0–2. So it was almost instantaneous to grade. Students would submit their work using a Google form that dumped their responses into a spreadsheet. I would just sort the spreadsheet in alphabetical order, look through for any glaring omissions or places where effort was lacking, and then put the grades right into Blackboard. A grade of “0”…
This semester, I made the decision to phase out paper from my professional life. Little by little, and over the course of perhaps a couple of academic years, I hope to shift as much as I can over to digital versions of everything I use in teaching, scholarship, service, and mentoring. There are several reasons I want to do this, but the main thing that convinced me to make the choice to go “as paperless as possible” were my grading practices. At some point during this semester, I became convinced that I simply must move away from paper when dealing with student work. Why? Here are a few reasons:
1. Paper-based student work is cumbersome. More than once this semester, student work has gotten lost or misplaced because it was put into the wrong stack, stapled to the wrong thing, or in one case the staple for one student’s submission got hung on the staple for another student’s submission…
…it’s not really good to farm out your grading tasks to a person who is not an employee of your university, as one faculty member at IU-South Bend apparently has done:
Professor Otis B. Grant faces sanctions as a result of student complaints that he allowed a nonemployee to grade student work and access student academic records, a potential violation of federal privacy laws.
Students also complained that Grant used foul language in class, improperly canceled classes and dismissed two students from a course without due process.
The investigation did not determine the identity of Riane Hunter, the name used by a woman who identified herself as Grant’s graduate assistant. Students said she graded and signed their academic papers and sent instructions to the class from Grant’s campus e-mail address.
No one named Riane Hunter is employed by IUSB or has ever been enrolled at any IU…
It’s week 5 of the semester for us, which is crunch time for students — and professors. This is the time of the semester when everybody has tests and papers all due, usually on the same day, which means there’s lots of grading. I don’t like grading, but it has to be done. And if I treat grading lightly or let it pile up, I will make mistakes when I grade and students won’t get the feedback they need to improve in a timely way. As an academic type, grading is one of the most important, difficult, and time-consuming features of my job and therefore requires careful management. But it doesn’t fit…
The video post from the other day about handling ungraded homework assignments went so well that I thought I’d let you all have another crack and designing my courses for me! This time, I have a question about really bad mistakes that can be made in a proof.
One correction to the video — the rubric I am developing for proof grading gives scores of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10. A “0″ is a proof that simply isn’t handed in at all. And any proof that shows serious effort and a modicum of correctness will get at least a 4. I am reserving the grade of “2″ for proofs that commit any of the “fatal errors” I describe (and solicit) in the video.
I am a mathematician and educator with interests in cryptology, computer science, and STEM education. I am affiliated with the Mathematics Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. The views here are my own and are not necessarily shared by GVSU.
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