Just Grade the Exams.
This is an excerpt from our new podcast, Accelerated Physics. It’s a podcast where we talk physics and math education: how to improve your learning, your teaching and how to connect that material to the big ideas in physics. You can access the podcast feed here.
Today’ we are once again talking about teaching. Specifically, we’re talking about grading exams: how to manage your informally aggregated staff, how to get it done efficiently, and why you should do it immediately.
The context will be undergraduate education, but a lot can be directly applied to high school physics as well. We’ll share some practical tips and hard truths, as well as some borderline egregious counterexamples that you’ll want to personally avoid. So let’s dive in.
Tatiana and Bill
The two best undergraduate professors I’ve encountered were something of a tag team - and an unlikely one at that: Tatiana Eurikhamova and Bill Bassichis. Now, I’m very biased - those two were in good with my doctoral advisor, and they saved my bacon during some graduate school HR drama I was involved in - but in working with them, I’ve learned an enormous amount about what good, competent instruction looks like.
Before we discuss their outstanding approach to undergraduate, physics education, allow me to share a two terrible examples.
The Other Guys
1. One of my first experiences as a teaching assistant in graduate school was probably also the worst. The lead professor wrote us a group email saying that he was looking forward to working closely with each and every one of us. My first email to him a week or so later was completely ignored, and I was later told - by proxy - to use his graduate student as a liaison for any and all communications. He was also the kind of guy who used a scantron — a bubble sheet - for his undergraduate exam. We’ve been over the tragedy of that approach to assessment already. The students in my recitation section at least, were not happy with him.
2. The cecond unfortunate example came only one semester later! This professor’s approach to grading was both haphazard and inconsistent. My first contact with him was an email was sent out only a few hours before we were to grade. Needless to say, I never arrived. My nonresponse to the event was to my horror immediately escalated to department leadership before I even received that first email! Such massive disrespect for subordinates resulted in immediate pushback from my and the other students and we had zero incentive to do anything for that guy beyond the bare minimum. As the next exam approached, the grading strategy again shifted. This time the various TAs were each assigned a different problem, and we met informally in the halls to pass stacks of exams around. It was almost a week before I got the full stack of papers to grade my problem. The risk involved with individual graduate students being responsible for all those exams on campus is still something I fail to comprehend.
People. You are professionals. Get organized!
Back to Tatiana and Bill
Okay, so we know what bad looks like. We have some context for what we’re trying to avoid. What did Tatiana and Bill get right?
First year physics exams are traditionally given in the evenings. They’re infrequent but long affairs and need to be free from conflicts. There were usually four such exams per semester, include the final.
The grading “staff” if you could call them that, was a team of professors and graduate teaching assistants, all of whom were associated with this particular block of physics courses. Maybe 4 professors and 12-15 graduate students were involved.
We’d all meet after the exam — and I mean, immediately after the exam — to grade into the night. Usually we’d start around 7 or so and finish just before midnight. Sometimes it would go later. It’s a kind of arrangement that can only exist in Academia, where boundaries are bit more malleable.
And because of this it’s easily assailable by folks who closely guard their personal time, and I am normally one of those folks! But this is an exception. An important exception. There is so much good that comes out of it, not least of which is pure time efficiency.
Let’s go over how this all worked.
In the Room
Each professor would nucleate a cluster, and the graduate students would aggregate around one. Experienced TAs would likely have arrived earlier - or even proctored the exam - and have a preferred professor to work with. New ones would arrive later and just slot in organically.
Each team would be assigned a problem to grade, and individual sections of the courses would be passed around from group to group, until all problems of all sections were graded. We’d all then collectively add up the scores and stack the exams by the door.
If one team finished early, they’d just take on some of the other work.
We’d all finish together. Hundreds of handwritten exams, graded by hand, in only a few hours. The professors would then go over the exam during the next class period. That way, the mental effort associated to the problems of the exam itself was completely time-limited and bounded. From giving the exam to grading the exam to reviewing the exam, nothing else happened in between. This kind of continuity might sound boring, but it’s actually quite a relief for professional scientists who are also working on other kinds of things simultaneously.
Just getting the work done all at once meant that you didn’t have to worry about it afterwards, you go near real time feedback on how the students did, and the students also got near real-time feedback on how they did. Just like we discussed with Tom Lemberger’s quizzes way back in episode 2, this rapid feedback can be invaluable.
How the Grading happened
Because this was first year physics, the professor and graduate students were largely considered as equals in terms of the intellectual material. The problems were easy enough for professionals to solve, and can usually be broken down into components.
As we’ve discussed a lot in the past, student errors often follow similar patterns. So after viewing a stack of 30 or so exams you typically have a representative sample of the entire set. Thus, within the first 30 minutes of grading, a rubric for the problem naturally forms within each group of graders. Points on the rubric were typically assigned collectively in conservation and debate, and the rest of the exam proceeds rapidly. Often Bill and Tatiana would have some preferences for assigning points for various ideas, which simplified things even further. Most of the work that remained was sorting exams into equivalence classes of error, and making up the exams appropriately. This collective approach to grading really sped the process up. Additionally, this had the added benefit of making the grading fair across student sections, as the rubric was basically universal.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bill bought everyone who graded a burger. The style was your choice. And he loaded up with onion rings, fries and drinks. They’d arrive around 8 or 8:30, so we’d have settled in by then. Crucially, this was nice acknowledgment of the massive pay discrepancy between professor and graduate student, but also an implicit acknowledgement of the ask involved.
Lesson Learned
1. As with any series of major, multi hour events that requires interpersonal and professional interaction: we build community! We’re all grading together. Our objective is get out of there, sure, but I never once thought “gosh this sucks”.
2. Get it all done in one sitting. Never have to think about that exam again. And, as a result, both students and instructors get the fastest possible feedback.
3. Pattern recognition naturally generates a rubric for the problems that applies equals to all students over a dozen plus sections.
4. Finally, it’s a system that evolves well. New graduate students assimilate well with the experienced graduate students, after one or two semesters of this are in.
If you’re grading first year exams in physics or mathematics, I strong encourage you to think along these lines.
High School
Now, how would you apply these lessons in a smaller context, perhaps as a individual actor, like an unsupported high school or community college teacher?
First, the observation that student errors typically align themselves into equivalence classes. You can base the rubric on those. Go through the full set of exams first.
Second, do it right after the exam. Don’t wait. Stay up late and suck it up. It’s worth it to have it done immediately. Buy yourself a fun meal in the process. A pizza. A burger. A burrito. Something to help you power through and be a reward mid stream. Teaching is hard and makes society a better place. You deserve it.
