7 Years Later Excerpt #1: Handling Grade Inquiries

By Trevor Hedberg

For the first few excerpts from 7 Years Later, I'm going to focus on teaching. Most do not have much preparation for undergraduate teaching prior to the start of graduate school, and I found it to be one of the more challenging aspects of graduate school when I was getting started.

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One of the more awkward aspects of being a grader, teaching assistant, or instructor is handling students who confront you about the grade they have received. Addressing grade inquiries is an inevitable part of being an instructor – it’s not a situation unique to being a graduate student. No matter how clear your grading criteria or how much class time you devote to recapping mistakes from the most recent exam, there will always be some students who ask you for more information about why they received their grade. However, as a graduate student, these interactions can be particularly vexing since you will have less experience dealing with them. There are at least three distinct types of grade inquiries, and different responses are appropriate to each one.

First, there are grade inquiries that boil down to grade entry errors. One type  involves the score on Canvas or Blackboard (or whatever learning platform your institution uses) not matching the score listed on the assignment itself. Another might involve too many (or too few) points being deducted on a particular question. Imagine a “-3” next to a 30-point question but a numbered score on the page of 25/30. Resolving these kinds of inquiries is straightforward: confirm that there’s a mistake in how the assignment was scored or how the grade was recorded, thank the student for reporting it to you, and correct the score. Obviously, You don’t want these grading errors to happen often – not all students will notice them, which means they sometimes result in inaccurate assessments of students’ knowledge, and persistent errors of this type will cause students to lose confidence in your professional competence. However, you will grade enough assignments that some mistakes of this type will happen. That’s okay; just correct them and move on.

The second type of grade inquiry, which is probably the most common, involves genuine misunderstanding. This is a case where a student sincerely does not understand why they received a particular score on a question or assignment. This could be because written comments given on the assignment were too minimal, they don’t know how to interpret the feedback, or they were absent when you went over the exam in class. Handling these inquiries in philosophy courses tends to be more challenging than doing so in courses like physics or calculus. In STEM courses, instructors can usually reference an answer key and explain how the student made an error in their calculation or defined some term incorrectly. But explaining why a student’s argument is not very strong can be trickier.

When students are evaluating an author’s viewpoint or defending their own, some of them tend to think that as long as they give reasons for their opinion, that’s sufficient for a high grade (even if you explain in class that this isn’t the case). So when you explain why they did not score well on a question, you want to avoid pushing them to the knee-jerk reaction that you scored them low because you didn’t “like” their opinion. If you’ve explicitly covered some of the basic aspects of good reasoning earlier in the course, you can reference those to frame your remarks. When possible, it can be helpful to mention what you like about the student’s response and emphasize ways in which it could be improved rather than saying something like, “You said ___________, and that’s clearly wrong.” It is appropriate to highlight things the student has said that are not accurate, such as if they misrepresent the position of an author you covered in class, but this has to be done carefully. Your feedback needs to be constructive rather than just being an attempt to justify the grade they received. Additionally, you don’t want them to feel like your explanation involves a judgment about them or their character, since that may discourage them from asking you questions in the future. It’s a tricky balancing act, especially with students who are not used to receiving and processing criticism. The good news is that most students who are making these grade inquiries will take your feedback seriously and try to improve in the future.

It’s also worth noting that you may, in your discussion with a student about their answer, discover a small detail you overlooked when grading their response. These oversights usually only make a small difference on the exam score as a whole: a score of 17/20 instead of 15/20 is not going to make a big impact on a 150 point exam, for instance. Even so, if the student has a good reason to think they should be scored higher, then you should be willing to increase their grade. Just be sure to grade carefully so that these instances of grade correction do not happen very often. As with grade entry errors, frequent mistakes in evaluating student responses will make students lose confidence in your ability to grade accurately.

The third type of grade inquiries, which are the least pleasant to deal with, are negotiation attempts. These occur when a student is primarily focused on increasing their score on the assignment rather than understanding the material better or just clarifying that the assignment was scored correctly.

The most common type of attempted grade negotiation is the end-of-semester email in which a student asks for a higher grade. The case of the pleading student who needs a higher grade in your course to boost their GPA is perhaps the most common example. This is a bullshit argument for two reasons. First, since their GPA is a reflection of their performance across a range of classes, your class will never be the sole determining factor in what their GPA is. Second, their cumulative GPA has no relevance to whether they were graded fairly on a specific assignment or in your class as a whole. Sadly, some students are taught to ask all their professors for higher grades as a tactic for improving their GPA. They think there’s nothing to lose by doing so, and that’s why some professors get absurd requests to “round up” an 88.6% to an A-. You should never change a student’s grades for these reasons unless there’s actual evidence that their grades were undeserved.

Negotiation attempts can also take place during the semester, though they are rarer. In my experience, they are usually undertaken repeatedly by the same student. These students may initially appear to want to know this information to improve their understanding, but often, that is not what’s really going on. Their real intentions become apparent when they challenge grades on assignments where the correct answers and their explanations are rather straightforward (such as a multiple choice quiz) or when they challenge grades that are already in the A range. In one of my courses, a student challenged her grade on every assignment she submitted during the first 6 weeks of the semester unless she received a perfect score on the assignment. This eventually culminated in an exchange where she got very angry that I would not change a 24/25 on an assignment to a 25/25. After standing firm on my scores for several assignments in a row, she stopped with her negotiation attempts. Fortunately, in more than a decade of teaching, I have only encountered a few students who fit the profile of the persistent negotiator, and all of them eventually relented. The key is to stay firm in your judgments and not give them reason to think their negotiating behavior will be rewarded in the future.

It isn’t possible to prevent all types of grade inquiries, but using the right approaches can make the experience less unpleasant. Additionally, as you teach more and refine your grading standards, student misunderstandings should become less frequent, which will make these interactions rarer.

Comments

[Tammo]

I like to send type 3 students this: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/why-did-i-get-a-b-an-answer-in-four-fables

Of course, that's mainly for my own enjoyment...