Grading is an important part of teaching. Grades serve a number of roles above and beyond the simple evaluation of a student's work. According to Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson, grades are also a means of communicating with students, parents, and other educational stakeholders; a means of motivating students for continued learning; and a means of organizing a lesson or other unit of instruction. In this last capacity, grades serve as moments of closure and transition.
Even in their basic "evaluative" capacity grades can be rich sources of information for students and educators alike. Grades help students see what they don't know or haven't learned. This can help them improve in the remainder of the course. And grades help teachers, too. Specifically, they help teachers identify potentially problematic moments in their instruction. This might encourage teachers to return to materials that students seem to have understood poorly or to change their lesson plans in future iterations of the course.
Some kinds of assessments are relatively easy to grade. One might even say that some assessments – multiple-choice tests or quizzes, for example – "grade themselves. " The instructor has essentially no subjective input. But this is not true for a large swath of assessments, foremost among them essays and long-form answers on quizzes and exams. In these cases of grading papers it is imperative, both as a matter of equity and efficiency, for teachers to develop grading rubrics.
A grading rubric identifies the key criteria for success in any particular assignment and pairs various degrees of meeting those criteria with a distinct letter or number grade. For example, when grading papers, a teacher might identify the following criteria for excellence on a final paper: clarity, originality, formatting. Within each criterion, the teacher would then list degrees of fulfillment and pair those degrees with a letter or number grade. An essay, for example, which was characterized by very clear prose might receive an "A" for that criterion. If that same essay, however, was deeply unoriginal, it might receive a "C" for that criterion. And if it lacked documentation all together, it might receive a "D" or an "F" for that criterion. The teacher would calculate the final grade on the essay according to a formula that she had determined in advance. (She might weigh each criterion equally, or might assign the most important relatively more weight).
Grading rubrics can be shared with students. Many teachers find this practice an effective way of eliminating bias, which is wont to creep into even the most diligent instructors' grading. It also helps remove any ambiguity students might have about success on the assignment. Sharing grading rubrics with them allows them to know just what instructors will look for in their work and on the basis of what their work will be judged.
Grading an Essay
Professors often employ grading rubrics while grading papers.