We have been working with faculty for more than 15 years, in workshops at our own institutions and across the country, to help them improve their grading processes. Improved grading processes can be documented for accreditation agencies and other external audiences. Faculty members' learning objectives, assignments, grading criteria, student scores, and descriptions of how they have used assessment in their classrooms can be collected, aggregated, and analyzed to answer departmental or institutional questions. We are currently preparing a monograph for publication by the American Association for Higher Education about these institutional uses. But, in this article, we want to discuss how to improve classroom grading processes for faculty across disciplines.
Faculty development is the key.
We use our own practice as an example. We first ask everyone to select one particular course from their respective schedules that they want to improve. The goals always focus on higher-order reasoning, the top levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Next, we ask faculty to name the central graded assignments that both teach and test their central goals. We help them determine whether tests and assignments are actually measuring their central goals.