From outcome to assessment
The process of assessment begins with designing assignments that fit with the learning outcomes of your course (if you are a GI), and continues with the assessment of students’ performance in those assignments. Because students learn in different ways and have different strengths, it is often beneficial to have a variety of different kinds of assignments in your course.
- For guidelines on assignment design, see the CTE’s Assignment design: checklist.
- For guidelines on student assessment, see the CTE’s resources on Assessing students.
Formative and summative assessment
Assessment can take two forms:
- Formative assessment is given before a student submits a final version of an assignment or before a student undertakes a high-stakes test. Its goal is to monitor student learning so that students can improve their work before submitting it in final form and you can more specifically focus or modify your instruction to meet their needs. Because formative assessment is generally given before a student has completed a final version of an assignment, it can be more informal and is generally low stakes, having little or no weight in the assignment or course grade.
- Summative assessment is given on the final assignment or test, or at the end of an instructional unit or course. Its goal is to evaluate student learning by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Because summative assessment is evaluative, it is generally high stakes.
Formative assessment plays an particularly important role in the teaching of writing. See Using a writing process approach. Not all assessment necessarily needs to be expressed in the form of marks—you can offer an assessment of an assignment (for instance a draft) without necessarily giving a grade or counting the grade toward the student’s final mark.
Define marking criteria
The best way to ensure that your marking is fair and accurate and to ensure that your students will understand and accept your grades is to define clear marking criteria for your assignments. Students will produce better assignments and are more likely to see your marking as fair if your expectations are clear to them. The criteria should be presented to the students before they write the assignment so they can keep them in mind while writing and they should be referenced in your assignment comments so students can see that the specified criteria are the foundation for their grade.
The way in which you present the criteria can vary depending on the kind of assignment. For assignments that lend themselves to very specific criteria, you might base the students' writing and your marking on a rubric, with or without weighted elements. See the CTE's Rubrics: Useful Assessment Tools.
For assignments in which the criteria are more general or abstract, you might present them as a list, perhaps with a suggested prioritization but without specific numerical weightings.
Marking appropriately
The clearest, most justifiable assignment grade is one that is based on the marking criteria. Incorporating external factors into the marking, such as the student's past grades, their degree of improvement, participation in class, personal circumstances, or the amount of effort they've put in will complicate the grading process and lead to grades that are less explainable and consistent, unless those factors are explicitly included in the marking criteria.
Mark in a way that is appropriate for the level of your class: for example, don’t expect upper-year work from first-year students. While your class average will vary somewhat depending on the cohort you are teaching, English class averages tend to be around 75% for first- and second-year courses, and 78% for upper-year courses.
For TAs, your course coordinator will hold grading meetings in order to promote consistency across the course.
For information on the administration of marks, see Managing grades.