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INTRODUCTION Grading is a great tool, faculty use to communicate with their students, colleagues, and institutions, as well as exterior entities. Teachers have spent nearly every day of their teaching lives wrestling with the problems, the power, and the inconsistencies of the grading system. Through their personal experiences in the classroom and from various institutions at workshops around the country, effective Grading presents suggestions for making classroom grading fairer, more time-efficient, and more beneficial to learning. Every parent wants to brag that his or her child is “a straight A student,” at the top of his/her class, What generally verify this prized status? Grades Most often, report cards are the principal means of measuring a student’s progress through school. Doing well in school is measured by a series of letters on a piece of paper. But what do those letters really mean? And do they really do any good? Many researchers, educators and parents are now questioning the purpose and efficiency of grades.
Certainly parents deserve to know how their children are doing in school, and students benefit from understanding how they are performing; but how that development is communicated can have a great impact on how a student learns. Grading is the process by which a teacher evaluates student learning through classroom tests and assignments, the circumstance in which good teachers establish that procedure, and the conversation that surrounds grades and defines their meaning to various audiences. Grade serves four roles: 1. It evaluates the quality of a student’s work; . It communicates with the student, as well as employers, graduate schools, and others; 3. It motivates how the students study, what they focus on, and their involvement in the course; and 4. It organizes to mark transitions, bring closure, and focus effort for both students and teachers. This is the reason grade is so important for the assessment process – principally in the minds of faculty. According to Kohn there are three consistent effects of giving students grades – or leading them to focus on what grade they’ll obtain.
First, their interest in the learning itself is reduced. Second, they come to desire easier responsibilities – not because they’re slothful, but because they’re rational. Third, students be inclined to think in a more external manner – and to forget what they learned more quickly – when grades are concerned. 2 If faculties construct grading systems that are advantageous to learning they can create and generate information that can be useful for appraisal of learning outcomes.
The challenge then is to create and select assignments and exams that will both teach and test the learning most concern about. This then will motivate students to learn what they need to know to do well. Once the teacher establishes the learning outcomes about which she/he most cares, then the challenge is to establish criteria and standards for grading, calculate course grades, communicate with students about their grades and the grading process, and make grading time-efficient.