Most of you are now knee deep in your least favorite part of the job: grading final exams and papers. For three reasons, I have never disliked the grading experience as much as many of my colleagues do. First, I always grade with a faculty friend at a local coffeehouse. Spending time with a friend ensures I never procrastinate, and having someone with whom to whine and celebrate has made the experience more enjoyable. Second, I have learned a process that allows me to be consistent and accurate in my grading. Third, I make an effort to learn something about my teaching from my students’ successes and failures. The following paragraphs address the latter two practices.

Ensuring Consistency and Accuracy

The key to ensuring consistency and accuracy is having a strong grading rubric. A rubric, as you probably know, is “a type of scoring guide that assesses and articulates specific components and expectations for an assignment.” (“Using Rubrics,” Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation.) Even if you did not create a rubric in advance of your final exam and share it with your students, you can still create an excellent scoring rubric as part of your grading process. Here’s how: 

1. Review the question and what you were trying to test, including the relative weight of the issues you tested.

2. Read 5-10 exams and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the exams and use this information and what you did in Step 1 to create a grading scoresheet, ideally out of 100 points. Consider including a “bonus” category for a student who does an extraordinary job of analyzing an issue.

3. Try out your draft scoresheet on a few exams and on the 5-10 exams you already have reviewed and adjust the scoresheet accordingly.

4. Start grading, taking a break every hour. (This is where my practice of grading with a friend helps.) 

5. When you finish, use the final version of your scoresheet to officially grade the 5-10 exams you first tried out your scoresheet on. 

Learning from Students’ Exam Results

Ideally, you would review the exams one last time and identify areas where your students scored well and the areas where they struggled, but, by this time, you may be like me and be sick of reading this set of answers. At the very least, right as you finish scoring each essay question and before you go on to the next question or start calculating final grades, take five minutes to identify at least one thing your students did well on the exam and at least one area in which you wish they had performed better. Take notes on how you might continue to do the things that seemed to have worked and change the things that did not. Save your notes with your course teaching notes so you can review what you learned from the exams before you next teach the course. 

This approach engages you in a true assessment cycle: teaching the class, gathering information about student learning, interpreting the data, and then using what you have learned to improve the course.

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While you may never get to a place where you enjoy end-of-the-semester grading, my hope is that, at the very least, you will have spent time with a friend, will feel better about the process, and will learn something you can use to improve your teaching.