Grading And Assessing Student Work

GRADING AND ASSESSING STUDENT WORK


One of the aspects that these seven articles had in common was the unreliability and subjectivity of the grading system in the United States. Whether itbe the bell curve or the J curve, a letter grade or a number grade, these symbols did not reflect the actual progress (or lack of it) that the student was making. In the words of Jaques L. Gibble: “there is evidence that (grading on the curve) does more harm than good to both the student and the teacher.” There have been many studies done about teacher subjectivity towards their students andhow this can also affect their grades. Others came up with “the mastery approach” to find out if the student was able to master his/her subject in order to move on to the next stage. Yet anotherexperiment was conducted where student work was divided into three piles: the first one received only a letter or a number grade. The second received a grade and a small comment such as; Excellent! Goodwork, let's raise this grade! The third pile received a grade plus a personal comment from the teacher. It was shown that the third pile had much better grades than the other two in the long run.Grading can also turn one student against the other making it a competitive activity where “learning becomes a game of winners and losers” (DW Johnson and Johnson 1989). It was also shown that studentswho received a low grade without any positive reinforcement, eventually gave up trying and in some cases dropped out of school.

The learning criteria is divided into three categories: theproduct criteria which focuses on what the students know and can do at that point in time, the process criteria “who believe product criteria do not provide a complete picture of student learning”(Fray, Cross and Weber 1993) and the progress criteria which considers how much the student has learned from his/her experience in school. The article written by Jaques L. Gibble recommends the use of...