Grading Techniques For Tuning Student And Faculty Performance

New faculty are highly qualified in their own field, where they have accumulated some research experience and where they can bring fair amounts of enthusiasm. This article discusses grading techniques that help match student performance and instructor interest. Grading as a tool for evaluating student performance has been considered mainly from the student perspective. Anybody new to teaching rarely has proper training on grading techniques, which often are of least concern relative to teaching content. Nevertheless, grading as perceived by students may greatly impact their attitude towards the course and its instructor. It has been proven that students are very sensitive to grades and inaccurate evaluation of their perceived performance can also alter their future performance as well as their evaluation of teaching, which may adversely affect the instructor. Often, scaling of raw scores is used in grading engineering tests. There are no official standards on how this operation should be performed, hence the wide variation in the common procedures used. This work compares a few common-sense scaling procedures and shows how the final outcome may vary when determined from the same raw scores. Such grading variations significantly affect what the evaluation of the students’ performance represents. This article offers recommendations on use of scaling methods so that the negative impacts of grading techniques and grade distortions can be minimized and lead to enhanced and efficient evaluation standards. Since grading and grading techniques are of general interest to instructors, this article may be of service to many instructors, especially to the new and relatively new faculty willing to review some of their own grading procedures.