Grading and Evaluating Student Work

Grading and evaluating student work is one of the most stressful and time-consuming parts of teaching. The resources on this page provide discussion and examples for how to reflect on grading and incorporate strategies to make the process thoughtful, efficient, and less arbitrary.

Peru State Forms and Resources

• Grading Your Courses
• Incomplete Policy & Contract
• Grade Change (see your myPSC dashboard, look at Messages. Instructions here.)
• If you have any questions about the grade submission process, please direct them to the Student Records Office at 402-872-2356.

Grading Student Work

An excellent point of departure for this discussion comes from Vanderbilt University at the link below:

• Grading Student Work (Vanderbilt University)

Backward Design

Backward design is a method of starting with student learning outcomes and then designing instructional content, strategies, and assignments that will lead to student achievement of those outcomes. The book Understanding Design by Wiggins and McTighe (1998) is one of the most cited publications to develop this concept. The site below from Vanderbilt University "will explain the benefits of incorporating backward design. Then it will elaborate on the three stages that backward design encompasses. Finally, an overview of a backward design template is provided with links to blank template pages for convenience."

• Understanding By Design (Vanderbilt University)

Evaluation Methods

• Writing Good Multiple Choice Test Questions (Brame, 2013)
• Designing and Administering Tests (University of Kansas)
• Designing Effective Writing Assignments (University of Kansas)
• Final Exams (University of California, Berkeley)
• Alternatives to Traditional Testing (University of California, Berkeley)

Rubrics

A rubric is a scoring instrument that identifies expectations for an assignment and then is used to assess student performance relative to those expectations. Rubrics can be used for a variety of assignments including papers, group projects, portfolios and presentations. Rubrics can also be embedded in Blackboard to efficiently grade student work. The video below demonstrates this process:



The sites below provide further definition of rubrics, along with examples for how they can be used.

• Writing Rubrics For Assessment
• Norming a Rubric
• AAC&U VALUE Rubrics
• Rubistar (online program to develop rubrics)
• Using Rubrics (Cornell University)
• Examples of Rubrics (University of West Florida)