Blog Entry #4-Grading and Cheating

After reading these chapters I have grown a greater appreciation for my professors who I now realize have spent countless hours grading exams. These chapters brought me back to memories of myself as an undergraduate reviewing my grade on essay questions and feeling like I had been cheated out of a few points here and there. I'm positive there have been multiple times that I had marched into my professors' offices and debated with them about my grade. I now realize I was that student; that one who cared more about my grades than anything and would fight for every point until I got it. That's the kind of student that intimidates me the most. The one who will question whether I've done my job grading correctly or whether I didn't give them a point where I gave someone else the point. I was that student so I can understand where they will be coming from. Although, that might not make it any easier to deal with.

• From chapter 8 from the book First Day to Final Grade, I found the section on grading short answer and essay questions to be very useful. The book states that it is important to list the key points that you are looking for when grading these answers. A teacher should give partial credit for a short answer/essay that covers some of the desired points. Deciding ahead of time how many points will be given for a partial answers and how to calculate the weight of each key point is very important so students know they are being graded fairly.

This section was useful to me for several reasons. As I mentioned before, I was the student who always felt like I got cheated out of points on these questions. For that reason, I want to be a teacher who students can rely on to be fair when grading. I feel like I can grade fairly by formulating a list of the key concepts I expect from the short answer questions ahead of time. I will also list of topics or concepts that I will give partial credit for (those being points that aren't dead on but closely related to what I was looking for). I think it will be useful to write these points down for the students when going over the test. If I do this, I feel like they will know that I graded them the same and carefully considered what they wrote. I want to make my list available to them after the test to help them learn and figure out what they had right or wrong in their answer.

• First Day to Final Grade also suggests telling the students the minimum length their answers can be for these questions (p. 144). Other than the fact that it will save time on grading, this idea will communicate with students that they don't have to write everything they know about the subject.

Students may feel overwhelmed by the weight and complexity of an exam/short answer question. If students are informed that they need to just include several key concepts rather than "fluff", as my former professor called it, it may also alleviate some anxiety about the test questions. I just like the idea of being straight forward with the students and providing this extra information so they aren't so overwhelmed on exam days. I think a good way to implement this idea is to make sure the student knows how many points each question is worth and the weight of each correct concept they write down. If they know there are only 4 points possible I would bet they would spend much less time and write a lot less than if there were fifteen points possible. I'm sure there will still be students who write and fill from space on the entire page, but hopefully this advice will make my and their lives easier.

Other than just telling students how long their answer should be, I felt like the biggest take-home message from the grading chapters was to being careful when grading. McKeachie covers a few different methods of how to differently grade students more based on their competency and skills learned. Students will complain no matter what but opening communication about why you graded the way you did will make this less common (I would hope!). I found this link useful, which reiterated good basics for testing and grading.

• From McKeachie's Teaching Tips, chapter 10 provided some interesting information on cheating. A few of the tips to reduce cheating are to reduce pressure on tests by providing a few opportunities for the students to easily show their learning achievements (ex. starting out the test with a few very easy questions to build confidence), have a discussion early on in the course addressing the issue of cheating, write an interesting and reasonable test, and reduce stress by addressing issues students may be having in the class.

I found these concepts to be useful because I didn't think there were ways of keeping cheaters from cheating. I will implement these ideas in my own teaching so I can hopefully make cheating less common in my classes without making the students feel like I don't trust them. The part about graduate assistants not proctoring very actively was interesting to me (McKeachie, p. 117). I believe graduate assistants might let things slide to keep from falling out of favor with the students. The suggestion of walking to the aisles with a more helpful question answering demeanor may keep the students on good terms with you and keep them from cheating. Simply showing that you are alert and watching for cheating will hopefully deter some students from doing it. On a side note, McKeachie's approach to why and how students cheat was informative and showed me how I can be more conscious of how students are using technology to cheat.

The link I found about why students cheat has been my personal favorite thus far. I guess I have never thought about any reasons why a student would cheat other than the fact that they didn't study. The thing I really liked about this link is that there are teaching strategies to help prevent all kinds of cheating. Another link I found was about teachers helping students cheat on their college placement tests. Sad but true, sometimes teachers cheat too!