Marking Madness – How can we improve the quality of student assignments?

Dr Jennifer Fox , (edited by Dr Daniel Andrews) School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne

The deadline has passed. Your students have submitted their assignments – many of them only minutes before the cut-off!

As you begin to read their assignments, it becomes increasing obvious that many students haven’t looked at the marking criteria. They have missed the mark with their assignment and won’t get a good grade.

Which begs the question, how can we encourage our students to meaningfully engage with the marking criteria, while putting together their assignment?

Assessment language

Sometimes teachers and academics tend to use their discipline’s jargon or technical terms in marking criteria & assignment briefs. Many students will struggle to understand this language.

Try to include plain language in your marking criteria and define key terms for students. Better yet, give students an opportunity in-class to ask about the assignment and clarify how you want students to approach the task.

Provide examples of good work

One way to show students what is expected of them for an assignment is to provide examples of good work. You can present a previous student’s work (with their permission!) or even write an example yourself. Using a variety of examples that show different ways to approach the assignment and can even encourage student creativity and individuality.

You can take this approach to the next level by grading examples and adding expert marker comments to justify the marks given. Try to provide more than one example and have a range of different grades achieved.

Give students opportunity to practice grading in-class

Students learn by doing and will better understand the marking criteria by applying it themselves. This can be done by running an in-class activity where students practice grading short examples of work that is part of their assignment (taken from the example assignments), before getting immediate feedback from the teaching team and their peers.

After completing an activity such as this, the students will be familiar with the marking rubric, and will hopefully be more likely to use it while putting together their own assignments.

Peer Review

Peer review is another activity that improves students’ capacity to make calibrated academic judgments on a marking rubric.

Completing a peer preview, boosts the students’ ability to interpret the criteria to identify the quality of work in an assignment. They’ll also receive valuable insights from another student peer reviewing their work.

Everybody wins

Both you and your students will benefit by being upfront and transparent about what you expect from your students in their assignments. The students will have a clearer picture of the final product and what the markers will be looking for.  And best of all you should have fewer emails asking you about the assignment!

So, why not try out some of these tips to increase the clarity around the assessment tasks in your course.

 

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Further reading:

• https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/learning-the-language-of-assessment-assessment-literacy-and-assessment-guidance-for-students/
• Here’s a review of how exemplars can be used in education: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134
• For tips on how to incorporate a peer review into your subject: Involving students in peer review: A Guide