Assessing Student Work

This policy provides first-year students with the opportunity to learn about the standards for academic achievement at Wellesley and to assess the quality of their work in relation to these standards. It further enables them to use their first semester to focus on intellectual engagement and inspiration and to learn how to grow as a learner in college.

Sound liberating? That’s the idea. “When grades become the object of learning rather than learning itself, students are engaged in a form of goal displacement,” Professor of Sociology Lee Cuba t

the more time students spend thinking about getting an A, the less time they’re spending thinking about what they’re really learning.

Write extra questions that can be used for reassessments.

Offer students the opportunity for reassessment.

Require students who want to reassess to fill out reassessment form.

Each year I have less than a handful of students who come in to retake any part of their test. It's more of an organizational tool for me than it is for the students. I don't know how to change this.

Grading is easier and generally less time consuming

Student grades reflect what they know and are not artificially padded with extra points.

Students could reasonably bring up their grade - there wasn't as much "hopelessness" about their grades and I think that kept students willing to try, especially when we changed concept areas.

1) students waited too long to do it. I put an approximate 2-week limit (after returning tests) to re-assess. Students waited until almost the last day just to notify me of their intent to re-assess. The longer they waited the worse they did.

The good news this year, though, was that re-assessment didn’t take over all of my time like I thought it would. It took extra time, sure, but it was manageable. One of my projects this summer is to make a bank of more questions for assessment.

As for re-assessing, my biggest surprise was that many students chose NOT to re-assess! (this is honors, too!). I think back, even last year when I had a lazy group and grades were low. There I was agonizing about why, why, why, and what could I do to improve the grades….what I discovered is that I agonized over it far more than they did. The ones who didn’t re-assess accepted their grades. The ball was in their court, and they didn’t play. And I didn’t have to agonize over anything this year. So I guess it balances out — more time for me to do re-assessment, less time I spend agonizing over grades. I’ll take it.

Teachers sometimes think that reporting multiple grades will increase their grading workload. But those who use the procedure claim that it actually makes grading easier and less work (Guskey, Swan, & Jung, 2011a). Teachers gather the same evidence on student learning that they did before, but they no longer worry about how to weigh or combine that evidence in calculating an overall grade. As a result, they avoid irresolvable arguments about the appropriateness or fairness of various weighting strategies.

Teachers also indicate that students take homework more seriously when it's reported separately. Parents favor the practice because it provides a more comprehensive profile of their child's performance in school (Guskey, Swan, & Jung, 2011b).

At the same time, no research supports the idea that low grades prompt students to try harder. More often, low grades prompt students to withdraw from learning. To protect their self-images, many students regard t