Grading Practices: More Subjective than Objective?

A recent survey of 175 economics professors who teach basic principles of economics courses revealed a widely diverse set of grading practices for the course. These instructors taught at 118 different institutions, including doctoral degree-granting universities, two-year colleges, and everything in between. The findings are specific to the course and the field of economics. However, the questions raised by the analysis are relevant to grading across the board. The different grading policies and practices reported here are not uncommon, and one would suspect that findings like these are typical of any number of courses routinely offered by our institutions. Giving grades vs. earning grades: The authors begin by pointing out that the usual decree that faculty don't “give” grades, students “earn” them is not entirely accurate. The decree makes it sound as if faculty have no role in determining students' grades. In fact, teachers make grading policy decisions that directly influence how students go about “earning” their grades. For example, faculty establish the cutoff levels between the grades. They decide whether extra credit is an option. The authors maintain it is more accurate to say that faculty “assign” grades based on what students “earned.” “The survey evidence from this study shows that there are widespread differences among economics instructors about what constitutes a grade in a principles of economics course.” (p. 139). Some of the instructors grade using an absolute standard where the percentage of points needed for each grade is determined beforehand. Others grade on a curve or relative standard that depends on the performance in a particular course. The components used to determine grades—exams, quizzes, homework assignments, papers, or projects—were not the same. And even if there was some consistency, the various components were weighted differently. The exams themselves contained different kinds of questions, mostly fixed-response questions (multiple-choice, true-false), but also constructed-response questions and short and longer essay answers. Then these faculty reported a range of decisions as to whether course activities like participation were graded, whether missed exams could be made up, and whether grades close to the designated cutoff could, in some cases, be bumped up. We like to think our grading practices are objective, but policy decisions like these do add a certain subjectivity to the grade earning process. Does diversity in grading matter? The question is whether this diversity matters. Does it make a difference? The way students shop around for courses—in some cases looking for what may look like easy courses and other times looking for features that fit with how they think a course should be—would indicate that these policy variations do make a difference for students. For them it is often about how they'll go about getting the grade, but for the rest of us the concern must also be about what and how students learn the content, and this is where the research lets us down. We don't know what combination of graded assignments promotes the most learning in which courses or for what students, for example. Most likely, there isn't a definitive answer to that question, but at this point we're making these policy decisions based on untested assumptions. The authors provide one example of where diversity in grading practices is a problem. Researchers regularly examine the relationship between grades and any number of student variables, such as effort in courses, the selection of courses, gender differences in achievement, the willingness to take more courses in a discipline, or the student ratings of the course—the list is very long. In these studies, it is assumed that the letter grade given by one instructor is equivalent to the same grade given another instructor teaching a different section of the same course. In fact “there may be subtle or substantial differences in how each professor grades that can affect the distribution of grades and the comparability of grades across instructors.” (p. 346) We aren't all operating from the same playbook when it comes to how grades are determined. What we have not done is to consider the extent to which that's a problem regarding fairness and objectivity of the grades. We haven't linked our choices to learning. And we haven't spent much time thinking about how the diversity affects students who are already obsessively grade-oriented. Reference: Walstad, W. B., and Miller, L. A., (2016). What's in a grade? Grading policies and practices in principles of economics. Journal of Economic Education, 47 (4), 338–350.