In the current era of student accountability, coupled with high-stakes testing, schools have focused on the alignment of standardized curriculums and assessments. However, developing standardized grading practices are still under examination. Grading serves as an important responsibility, yet many teachers still find the process a challenge of…

This article takes up the "special strangeness" of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author's research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher…

Within the physical education discipline, there has been debate and a lack of consensus with regard to the relevancy of various factors used for the determination of student grades such as attendance, being dressed in a physical education uniform, and participation. To examine current professional practice with respect to grading in physical…

Accurate marking is crucial to the reliability and validity of public examinations, in England and internationally. Factors contributing to accuracy have been conceptualised as affecting either marking task demands or markers' personal expertise. The aim of this empirical study was to develop this conceptualisation through investigating the…

Handling appeals against grades is time consuming and requires allocation of resources away from the pursuit of activities such as instruction, research, and supervision of postgraduate students. This study examines grievance policies, frequencies, and outcomes of appeals at the University of California (UCB) and the University of Oslo (UIO). We…

This paper suggests that when a course is planned within one culture for delivery to members of another culture, appropriate quality control of assessment becomes an issue of major proportions. Based on their experience of presenting an Aid Agency-funded Masters course in a developing country in the Pacific, the authors describe the processes to…

The concept of fail-forward can be used as a teaching technique to motivate students to learn from their mistakes. For example, when students are allowed to re-work incorrect responses on a test for a partial grade they are failing-forward. In this paper we look at the effects of failing-forward on student effort in online learning environments.…

Assessment continues to be a topic of discussion and concern for many music educators and music teacher educators. The discussion of assessment in music education can spark lively and passionate debate among music educators, music teacher educators, students, policy makers, and parents alike. This article offers a discussion of some of the…

The Lithuanian Informatics Olympiads (LitIO) is a problem solving programming contest for students in secondary education. The work of the student to be evaluated is an algorithm designed by the student and implemented as a working program. The current evaluation process involves both automated (for correctness and performance of programs with the…

Struggling schools that come under increased accountability pressure face a number of challenges, changing instructional policies and practices to facilitate student improvement. But what effect does school accountability have on teachers' mobility decisions? This study is the first to exploit policy variation within the same state to examine the…

We define Grade Lift as the difference between average class grade and average cumulative class GPA. This metric provides an assessment of how lenient the grading was for a given course. In 2006, we started providing faculty members individualized Grade Lift reports reflecting their position relative to an anonymously plotted school-wide…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

The main purpose of this study is to focus on Swedish PE teachers' experiences with a criterion-referenced grading system and its practical consequences. It aims specifically at investigating the dimensionality of grades and how teachers reason and effectuate when grading students. The study consists of two parts: quantitative data collection of…

Although Social Security funds are in decline and no solution is evident, few politicians have the temerity to try to change the system. Why? Because Social Security is the third rail in politics: if one touches it, he or she will die. The field of education has an issue that is equally as lethal: grading. Grading is one of the most private…

Despite the recommendations of some measurement specialists, teachers do not always assign grades based on achievement only. The primary purpose of this study is to clarify the meaning of grades, and to examine some of the factors teachers consider when assigning final grades with a focus on borderline cases. The sample consisted of 516 American…