Assessment and Grading

When you evaluate your students, keep in mind what you are trying to find out about their knowledge and skills with each question.  If there are barriers that affect some students and not others, you may be inadvertently disadvantaging students not because of their knowledge of the content, but due to an unintended gate that keeps them from demonstrating their abilities.

You may have recently given or be getting ready to give a comprehensive assessment, such as a mid-semester exam.  There are ways that unconscious bias can sneak into the ways that we construct and even evaluate these materials, regardless of the beliefs we think we hold.  A good overview and introduction to this topic is the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Banaji and Greenwald, which summarizes several excellent studies about unconscious bias. 

Nonetheless, there are several practices you can put in place that help to make assessments and grading more inclusive.  In writing your assignments or exams, consider the following:

  • Try to use contexts and scenarios with diversity, equity and inclusion in mind.  For example, if analyzing data about sea level rise, use data that relates to other nations or continents.  If describing people in your questions, be sure to use a variety of gender pronouns and names that represent diverse races and ethnicities.
  • It is important that contextualized questions not reinforce harmful stereotypes.  You may want to have a colleague or other third party look at your draft and provide you with feedback.  Possible resources for review could also include the Center for Teaching and Learning, the CNS advising office, or a member of the UMass Faculty Senate Status of Diversity Council.
  • To be inclusive, and also to empower students to engage in their own learning, ask students to either submit possible test questions or to suggest topics that are of interest to them.  You can give the students some guidelines about the level of challenge or the type of questions you are looking for, which must be met for you to consider including them in the exam. Instructors who have done this have also shared all the submitted questions with the class (you know some of them would get circulated anyway), which creates some peer pressure to write good test questions, without revealing which one(s) you will include in the exam.

To minimize bias in your grading, consider the following:

  • Keep the name of each student hidden while doing the grading.  If you are able to have the students provide their name on a cover sheet, then you can fold the cover sheet back for each exam before you begin the grading. 
  • If there are multiple questions that are being graded, consider grading the same question on all of the exams and then shuffling the papers so that you are not grading in the same order every time.  This helps with small shifts in subjective decisions that can happen after multiple views of the same question.  This shift can be systematic, so shuffling the exams prevents the effect from always affecting the same students.
  • Incorporate a well-defined rubric for granting points to answers and providing feedback to students.  Design the rubrics in advance of doing any grading so that you can determine, independently of student responses, what you are looking for and what you consider acceptable or excellent responses.  This is the “microscopic” version of creating learning outcome goals for your course before you begin teaching and aligning teaching practices with those goals.  
  • Don’t use the color red when grading and providing feedback.  Consider blue, green, or purple instead.
  • Eliminate jargon in the test writing, unless you are specifically grading students’ knowledge of jargon.  Otherwise, provide a clarification or definition.  While you know it is desirable for students to know the jargon, is that what you want that particular question to be testing?
  • Consider the wording you use when providing feedback.  Rather than a comment than can be intimidating or even insulting, use a tone that encourages a student to grow their own understanding as a result of an error. 

References:

Hogan, Kelly A. and Sathy, Viji. (2022). Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press: Morgantown, WV.

Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2013). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people. Delacorte Press.

Status of Diversity Council, UMass Faculty Senate.

Allen, Deborah and Tanner, Kimberly. (2006). Rubrics: Tools for making learning goals and evaluation criteria explicit for both teachers and learners. CBE – Life Sciences Education. 

Kharback, Med. (2022). Best rubric making tolls for teachers. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.  

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804–824.