Carol Gering

I’m reading a book—new to me, but ten years old—titled Effective Grading: A tool for learning and assessment. I didn’t glean much from the first seven chapters, other than a few new structures for grading rubrics. Midway through the book, however, I’ve come to a chapter on “Making Grading More Time-Efficient” that has sparked some ideas. Of the nine principles listed in this chapter, one really caught my attention: Use what the student knows. I plan to try it in my Desktop Publishing class next week.

My primary assessments in the Desktop Publishing course are projects. The next assignment due is a one-page magazine article. These projects are always time-consuming to grade; it takes a while to review each of their computer files to see how they’ve implemented the requirements before writing feedback. As Effective Grading points out, I may be spending a lot of time trying to discover things my students already know. (”I knew I didn’t have that lined up properly” or “I knew I used too many fonts in this design.”)

The strategy I’m about to try is a Pre-Grading sheet that each student will turn in along with their assignment. In addition to saving me time, I hope it will help students learn to self-evaluate more effectively. Seems like an ingenious idea to me—but not all my ideas turn out to be as brilliant as I envision. I’ll let you know how it goes. You can view my pre-grading sheet on Issuu.