how to grade math homework

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Grading Math Homework Made Easy

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Grading math homework doesn’t have to be a hassle!  It is hard to believe when you have a 150+ students, but I am sharing an organization system that will make grading math homework much more efficient.  This is a follow up to my Minimalist Approach to Homework post. The title was inspired by the Marie Kondo book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up .  Though I utilized the homework agenda for many years prior to the book, it fits right in to the idea of only keeping things that bring you joy.

One thing is for sure, papers do not bring a teacher joy.

For further reading, check out these posts about homework:

• The Homework Agenda Part 2 (Grading Math Homework)
• Should Teachers Assign Math Homework?

I am also aware that homework brings on another conversation:

• what to do if it is not complete AKA missing assignments

Any teacher will tell you that a missing assignment is a giant pain.  No one enjoys seeing the blank space in the grade book, especially a middle school teacher with 125+ students. (Side note, my first year I had 157.  Pretty much insane.)

Grading Homework, Yes or No?

Goodness, this is a decision you have to make for you and the best interest of your students. In my experience, I would say I graded 85% of assignments for some type of accuracy.  I am not a fan of completion grades.  The purpose of homework is to practice, but we don’t want to practice incorrectly.   Completion grades didn’t work for me, because I didn’t want students to produce low quality work.  

Students had a “tutorial” class period (much like homeroom) in which they were allowed 20 minutes a day to work on assignments.  I always encouraged students to work on math or come to my room for homework help.  Yes, this often led to 40+ students in my room.  But, that means 40 students were doing math practice.  I love that.

I also believe that many students worked on it during that time because they knew it was for a grade.  This helps to build intrinsic motivation.  

Grading math homework:  USING THE HOMEWORK AGENDA

During the warm up, I circulated and checked for homework completion. Students would receive a stamp or my initials on their Homework Agenda. Essentially, the Homework Agenda (freebie offered later in this post) is a one-pager that kept students homework organized. As a class, we quickly graded the homework assignment. Then, I briefly would answer or discuss a difficult question or two.  To avoid cheating, any student who did not have their homework that day were required to clear their desk while we graded.

I would then present a grading scale.  This is where I might make math teachers crazy, but I would be generous.  Eight questions, ten points each.  Missing two problems would result in an 80.   I tried to make it advantageous to those who showed work and attempted, yet not just a “gimme” grade. 

Students would record their grade on their Homework Agenda. They would repeat this for every homework assignment that week. A completed Homework Agenda would have 4 assignments’ names, with 4 teacher completion signatures, and 4 grades for each day of the week that I assigned homework.

Later in the class or the following day as I circulated, I was able to see on the front of the Homework Agenda how students were doing and discuss personally with them whether or not they needed to see me in tutorials.   I was able to give specific praise to students who were giving 110% effort or making improvements. 

This is why I love the Homework Agenda.

“There is no possible way, I could collect the assignments individually and return them in a timely fashion. I tried that my first year and there was no hope. Since using it, I am quickly able to provide individual and specific feedback in a timely manner. It opens up conversations and helps be to encourage and be a champion for my students. ”

On Friday, I would collect the Homework Agenda.  If during the week you were absent, had an incomplete assignment, or didn’t complete one, Friday was D day.  It was going in the grade book on Friday.

Here is my weekly process:

• Collect homework agendas
• Have frank conversation with students who did not have it
• Record grades on paper (mostly to make putting it in the computer faster because they were ordered)
• Record grades in computer
• Send the same email to parents of students that did not turn in the agenda – write one email, then BCC names.
• List names of missing assignments on post-it note next to desk (official, I know)
• Pull students from tutorial time (homeroom) who owed me the homework
• Follow up with any students who were absent Friday and still needed to turn in their homework to me

What About the Missi ng Assignments?

Yes, there will be missing assignments.  Yes, students will come to Thursday and have lost their precious agenda.  However, it won’t happen often to the same kiddo.  My least organized student, who carried everything in their pocket, could fold that agenda up and hang onto it for a week.  It was too valuable.  Too many grades, too many assignments to redo.

We all know that it is much more work when students don’t complete their assignments.  It would be a dream world if everyone turned in their work everyday.  Unfortunately, we all live in reality.

We can vent our frustrations over students not doing work, which is legitimate.  We can also work towards solutions. 

The reality is that not every student has a support system at home.  I would love for us to be that voice of inspiration and encouragement.   Sometimes that voice sounds like tough love and a hounding for assignments and just being consistent that you value their education and you are not willing to let them give up on it.

They will appreciate it one day and you will be happy you did the extra work.

Want to try the Homework Agenda?  Download the template here, just type and go!

This post is part 2 in a two part series.  To read part 1, click here.

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Reader Interactions

42 comments.

February 29, 2016 at 2:39 pm

How do you prevent kids from cheating and writing a better grade than deserved? And you said 8 questions 10 points each, so do you then give them 20 points for attempting for making it an even 100?

March 1, 2016 at 2:46 am

Hi Lisa, thanks for the question. You make a great point about students wanting to write a better grade than they earned. The first few weeks, I really talk about what it means to be honest and check over their shoulders. As I walk around to check I will make sure everyone is marking their assignment correctly. I even will flip through what has been turned in on Fridays and double check or “spot” check. After several years of doing this, I can only count a handful of times when I had to deal with a situation. You would be surprised! Yes, I tried to make everything easy to grade as well as giving points for effort, especially if the assignment was difficult. Hope that helps!

May 20, 2016 at 10:03 pm

So do you have students turn in all the papers on friday as well or just the agenda? How do you spot check if you only collect the agenda?

May 20, 2016 at 10:38 pm

Hi Heather! Yes, I have students turn in their work with the agenda. If it was a handout/worksheet I provided, I just set the copier to staple it to the back. If it was something out of a text book, they would staple it to the agenda. Hope that helps!

June 4, 2016 at 9:42 pm

The ‘initials’ box on the homework agenda is for you to sign when checking who has it done? Or is the person correcting the paper initializing it?

Do you take off points for students not having an assignment done by the time Friday rolls around? Also, what does the small 1’s and 2’s in the corner of your gradebook mean?

June 5, 2016 at 6:56 am

Hi Alysia! I use the initials box to sign or stamp that it was complete before we graded it. I think you could have the student grading do that, but then you wouldn’t have a good grasp on how kids were doing throughout the week. I really liked going around at the beginning of class and touching base with students/seeing who needed extra help. Yes, I took off points for turing it in late. We had a standard policy on our campus that I followed. Also, by not having initials, it was by default late because it didn’t get checked when I came around. This section of my gradebook was during review for state testing, so the 1’s and 2’s were a little incentive I was running in my classroom. Review can be so boring and tedious, so I tried to spice it up with a sticker/point system for effort and making improvement. Hope this helps!

August 15, 2016 at 6:27 pm

I’m a bit confused how you assigned a grade to the homework assignment. First, you mentioned each problem was assigned 10 points. How did you determine how many points students would receive for each problem? If I read your blog correctly it sounds like you had the students score the assignment, how did you instruct them to score each problem? With 10 points for each problem it seems like there is a potential to have a wide range of scores for each problem based on who is grading it. Also, did the grader score it or did the student give their own work a grade? Sorry for all the questions…thank you!

August 16, 2016 at 6:43 am

Hi Tanya! In my example, there were eight problems but I only counted each as being worth ten points. That would be twenty points left over for trying/showing work/etc. As for marking it, each problem incorrect would be ten points off. Hope that helps. You could have either the student self grade or do a trade and grade method, whichever you felt more comfortable with.

November 28, 2016 at 1:28 am

Can you explain your grading system in the photo on this page where it reads, “Grading without the stacks of paper”? What do the small 1, 2 and 3’s mean? I assume your method on this posting is to avoid the complicated grading, but you’ve got me curious now about what method you were using in your photo. Thanks for clarifying this for me.

January 2, 2017 at 9:48 pm

The small numbers in the corner were used for an incentive. This photo is from a state assessment prep and I used various points for incentives to keep working!

December 26, 2016 at 7:31 pm

I like the idea of trade and grade. Right not I just check hw for completion and they get 5 points for doing the assignment. I treat this like extra credit for them. Most of them will at least attempt the problems and show their work. We also talk about just writing random numbers and how that will get no points.

December 26, 2016 at 7:34 pm

Ugh! The name is Celeste

March 11, 2017 at 7:25 pm

We aren’t allowed to do trade and grade due to privacy issues and legal issues. Otherwise, I do like this idea.

April 1, 2017 at 2:33 pm

I have heard that from other teachers. You could have them check their own, too.

May 30, 2017 at 3:19 pm

Do you allow them to redo and make corrections to their work for credit back? Or does the grade stand no matter what? This is why I go back and forth between correctness and completion. While they need to practice correctly, I don’t like being punitive for getting the answers wrong when they are learning the material for the first time. I want them to practice, and practice correctly. But I also want them to be motivated to persevere and relearn until they master the material.

June 4, 2017 at 6:10 am

Yes, it depended on the school policy but I would typically drop the lowest homework grade at the end of the grading period. If a student is willing to come in and work on their assignment (redo, a new one, etc), then I was always thrilled and would replace the grade! We want kids to learn from their mistakes. 🙂

June 4, 2017 at 1:48 pm

Regarding grading homework, my students have three homework assignments each week, with between 8 and 13 practice problems per assignment. I go through each problem and award 0-3 points per problem. 0 points if they did nothing. And then 1 point for attempting the problem, 1 point for showing necessary/appropriate work, and 1 point for a correct answer. This way, even if students get the problem wrong, they can still get 2 out of 3 points. If a student got each problem wrong, but were clearly trying, I would give them an overall grade of 70%.

June 20, 2017 at 8:13 pm

Great ideas! Love that!

August 31, 2019 at 8:27 am

Are you grading that, or the students?!?!

March 15, 2024 at 10:44 am

It depends! Usually I had my students grade!

June 15, 2017 at 4:54 pm

Do you staple the agenda to a homework packet to hand out on Monday?

June 20, 2017 at 8:07 pm

Yes! Well actually, I would copy it all together or if it was out of a text book, they would staple their work.

June 19, 2017 at 12:16 am

Our district insists that we MUST allow students an opportunity to complete assignments, and we have to accept them late. They do not specify how late though. I was bogged down with tons of late work this last year, and hated it. Can you please share with me your secret of how you handle late work, how late can it be, how much credit does it receive, and how do you grade it? That would help me tremendously. Thank You!

June 20, 2017 at 8:00 pm

We always had school policies for the amount of credit a student could earn, so I would follow that for credit. As far as actually collecting and grading, I did the following: 1. If it was late, I didn’t sign their assignment sheet. Instead I wrote late. 2. They had until Friday, when I collected the assignment sheet and homework to complete it. 3. On Friday, I would collect everything complete or not, and put grades in the grade book. Then, I would send an email to parents letting them know. Usually, kids would then be motivated to come to tutoring to complete any missing grades. I tried to not take any papers other than the Assignment Sheet and its corresponding work.

August 11, 2019 at 2:47 pm

If the students came in the next week and finished the missing assignment, would you give them full points or would they still lose some points for turning the assignment in late?

March 15, 2024 at 10:47 am

Hi, Jackie! I would go with your school’s grading policy.

August 12, 2018 at 1:55 pm

I really hate taking late work but when im forced to I tell my students that the highest grade they could receive is 5 points lower than the lowest grade fromthe student that turned it in on time.

July 17, 2017 at 3:30 pm

What percentage of their overall grade is homework? We are only allowed to give 10% which is why I only grade for completion and showing work. Maybe I’m not understanding correctly, but you have 80 points per assignment roughly?

August 11, 2017 at 5:26 am

Yes, I really tried to be generous and would give points for showing work/effort, to make the grading scale easy. Thanks!

July 30, 2017 at 9:07 pm

Love all the ideas. One question though – do you have any problems with kids not having their homework done, but making note of the correct answers while the class is grading and then just copying those answers later?

August 11, 2017 at 5:18 am

I would suggest to monitor and ask them to have a cleaned off desk if they did not have their assignment. Thanks!

August 22, 2017 at 11:37 am

What does your class look like on Fridays? If you only assign homework M-Th, when do your students get practice on the material that you teach on Friday?

September 2, 2017 at 9:01 pm

Hi Briana! I didn’t assign homework on Fridays, and really tried to plan for a cooperative learning activity if possible. This way we could practice what we did all week.

August 5, 2019 at 9:21 am

I love the idea of the homework agenda. I tried passing out papers and filing them but it was to time consuming. If students are allowed to take the packet back and forth every day what keeps them from sharing their answers to other students from another class period throughout the day? I love that you can put notes/reminders at the bottom of the agenda page.

June 11, 2018 at 11:07 am

Hello! Do you have a editable copy if your homework agenda anywhere? It seems like an interesting concept. I would love to see the overall layout.

March 15, 2024 at 10:13 am

Yes! You can get it here: https://www.maneuveringthemiddle.com/math-homework/

June 13, 2018 at 7:39 pm

What are your procedures for the agenda for those students who were absent the day you graded?

Hi, Brittany! What a great question. I would just collect any absent students’ packets when they return and grade them on my own.

December 2, 2018 at 11:21 am

I often give homework on Quizizz or EdPuzzle which scores for me. The kids who cannot do the assignment at home due to computer or internet issues can do it in tutoring. (I offer before school, after school, and lunch opportunities for tutoring.)

December 9, 2018 at 9:16 pm

How do you set up your homework agenda? In the date box do you put the due date? Or the date they receive the assignment? Do you have an example homework agenda?

December 22, 2018 at 11:34 am

Hi Alyssa! Yes, check out this blog post for more ideas and a sample: https://www.maneuveringthemiddle.com/math-homework/

August 20, 2019 at 11:41 pm

How and when in this process do you grade the homework for accuracy? At your quick glance at the start of class? On Friday after you collect the agenda and associated work? What mechanism do you use to provide constructive, timely feedback to the students?

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A Beginner’s Guide to Standards Based Grading

By Kate Owens , Instructor, Department of Mathematics, College of Charleston

In the past, I was frustrated with grades. Usually they told me very little about what a student did or didn’t know. Also, my students didn’t always know what topics they understood and on what topics they needed more work. Aside from wanting to do well on a cumulative final exam, students had very little incentive to look back on older topics. Through many conversations on Twitter, I learned about Standards Based Grading (SBG) and I implemented an SBG system in several consecutive semesters of Calculus II.

The goal of SBG is to shift the focus of grades from a weighted average of scores earned on various assignments to a measure of mastery of individual learning targets related to the content of the course. Instead of informing a student of their grade on a particular assignment, a standards-based grade aims to reflect that student’s level of understanding of key concepts or standards. Additionally, students are invited to improve their course standing by demonstrating growth in their skills or understanding as they see fit. In this article I will explain the way I implemented SBG and describe some benefits and some drawbacks of this method of assessment.

I chose Calculus II to try an SBG approach because it was my first time teaching the course, so I could build my materials from the ground up. Also, unlike several other courses I teach, the student count remains low — approximately 25 per section. Before the start of the semester, I created a list of thirty course “standards” or learning goals. Roughly, each goal corresponded to one section of the textbook. I organized the thirty standards around six Big Questions that I felt were the heart of the course material. One Big Question was, “What does it mean to add together infinitely many numbers?” The list of standards served as answers to these Big Questions.  The list of standards and a description of the grading system were distributed to the students on the first day of class. During the semester, students were given in-class assessments in the form of weekly quizzes, monthly examinations, and a cumulative final examination. The assignments themselves were similar to those found in courses using a traditional grading scheme, but they were assessed differently. Rather than track a student’s total percentage on each particular assignment, for every problem I examined each student’s response and then assigned a score to one or more associated course standards. I provided suggested homework problems both from the textbook and using an online homework platform, but homework did not factor directly into a student’s grade. Instead, if I noticed a student needed more practice at a particular sort of problem, I would direct her to the associated homework problems for additional practice.

During in-class assessments, a single quiz or exam question asking a student to determine if an infinite series converged might also require the student to demonstrate knowledge of (a) “The Integral Test , ” a strategy for determining if a series converges or diverges; (b) “Improper Integrals , ” the process used to evaluate integrals over an infinite interval; (c) some method of integration, such as “Integration by Parts,” and (d) some prior knowledge about how to evaluate limits learned earlier in Calculus I. For each of these concepts, I assign a different score (on a 0-4 scale), roughly correlated with a GPA or letter-grade system. During the semester, I tracked how well each student did on each of the thirty standards.  

Since some standards appeared in a multitude of questions throughout the semester, a student’s current score on a standard was computed as the average of the student’s most recent two attempts. Outside of class, each student could re-attempt up to one course standard per week. Usually these re-attempts occurred during office hours and were in the form of a one- or two-question quiz. My rationale for continually updating student scores is that I want grades to reflect a current level of understanding since I want students to aim for a continued mastery of course topics.   Over the course of the semester, their scores on standards can move up or down several times. Students are motivated to continue reviewing old material since they know that they might be assessed on those ideas again and their previous grades could go in either direction.

At the end of the term, each student had scores on approximately thirty course standards. To determine a student’s letter grade, I used the following system:

• To guarantee a grade of “A”, a student must earn 4s on 90% of standards, and have no scores below a 3.
• To guarantee a grade of “B” or higher, a student must earn 3s or higher on 80% of course standards, and have no scores below a 2.
• To guarantee a grade of “C” or higher, a student must earn 2s or higher on at least 80% of course standards.

I adapted this system from one Joshua Bowman used. I like it because it captures my feeling that an “A-level” student is a student who shows mastery of nearly all concepts and shows good progress toward mastery on the others; meanwhile, a “B-level” student is one who consistently does B-level work. Also, this system requires students earn at least a passing grade on each course topic. In a traditional system, a student might do very well in some parts of the course, very poorly in others, and earn an “above average” grade. In the system I used, for a student to earn an “above average” grade, they must display at least a passing level of understanding of all course concepts. While students aren’t initially thrilled with this requirement, most are happy once I explain they can re-attempt concepts often   (within some specific boundaries) and so the only limit on improving performance is their motivation to do so.

There are three major advantages of tracking scores on standards. First, I can quickly assess student performance:

Second, I can give meaningful advice to students:

Third, I can determine what topics are in need of review or additional instruction:

Students have noted that SBG has several benefits for them as well. They aren’t limited by past performance and can always improve their standing in the course. Many students who describe themselves as “not math people” or those who say they suffer from test anxiety appreciate that their grades can continue to improve, thereby lowering the stakes on any particular assessment. In my office, conversations are almost always about mathematical topics instead of partial credit, why they lost points here or there, or what grade they need on the next test to bring their course average above some threshold. The change in types of conversations during my office hours has been amazing, and for this reason alone I will stick with SBG in the future. Students review old material without prompting, they feel less stress over any individual assignment, we don’t have conversations about partial credit or lost points, and they are able to diagnose their own weaknesses.

With that said, the SBG system also has some disadvantages. First, it takes a thorough and careful explanation to students about the way the system works, why it was chosen, and why I believe it is to their benefit. Student buy-in is critical and it isn’t always easy to attain. I have found that spending a few minutes of class time discussing SBG every day for the first one or two weeks is more helpful than giving a lot of explanation on any particular day. Students need some time to think about what questions and concerns they have, and I encourage them to voice these in class whenever they like. Initially, students think that this system will be too much work for them, or that their course grades will suffer since past strong performance could be wiped out in the future. (In contrast, by the end of the semester, almost all students say they really appreciated this method and felt they learned more calculus than they would have in a traditionally graded course.) Second, several students complained that their grades were not available through our online learning management system; I still haven’t found a way to convince our online gradebook to work in an SBG framework. Instead, students must come to my office to review their scores with me outside of class time. Third, choosing both the correct number of course standards as well as a thorough description of each standard has been challenging. It’s difficult to balance wanting each standard to be as specific as possible while keeping the total number of standards workable from both my viewpoint and that of the students.

After several semesters of using an SBG framework, I believe the benefits to the students outweigh the disadvantages.  At this point, I don’t have any firm data about student learning outcomes, but I do have some anecdotal evidence. The feedback from my students about this method of grading and, in particular, the details of my implementation has been very positive. I have received several e-mails from former students who, even semesters later, realize how much SBG changed their perspective on the learning process, or who wished their new instructors would switch to an SBG system. Comments on my student evaluations have mentioned that they feel their grade accurately reflects how much calculus they know, rather than how well they performed on a particular assignment, or how much they were punished from making arithmetic mistakes. As one student noted, “this class was not about how well you could take a test or quiz or do homework online that sucked. It was about the amount of calculus you understood and your effort to be better at it.” As a calculus instructor, this describes my exact goal for my course.

If you are interested in trying an SBG approach in your own courses, here are four questions to jump-start your journey:

• What are the core ideas of your course? What concepts or ideas do you want students to master?
• How many standards do you think you can track? You need them to be specific enough that students can understand exactly what each one means, but you also need to have few enough that your grading workload is manageable. I have 30 for a 16-week semester.
• Will you allow re-attempts? What kinds of limits will you set, if any? I found that limiting students to re-attempting only one standard per week was essential in cutting down my grading workload. This limit also gave students the opportunity to focus on one topic at a time, rather than re-attempting several at once just to see what would stick.
• How will a final assessment, project, or exam count? In my course, a student’s course score on each standard is a weighted average: 80% comes from their pre-final exam score and the remaining 20% comes from the score earned on the final itself. In this way, the final exam contributes about 20% to the student’s letter grade in the class, a figure in line with what is commonly used in my department.
• How will you convert all the scores on standards into a letter grade?

Online SBG Resources

• Twitter hastags: #sbg, #sbgchat, #sblchat
• http://tinyurl.com/SBGLiterature , Scholarly articles related to SBG (list maintained by Matt Townsley)
• http://thalestriangles.blogspot.com/search/label/sbg , SBG blog posts by Joshua Bowman (@Thalesdisciple)
• http://shawncornally.com/wordpress/?p=673 , Standards-Based Grading FAQ by Shawn Cornally
• http://blogs.cofc.edu/owensks/tag/sbg/ , my own blog posts about SBG
• https://plus.google.com/communities/117099673102877564377 , a newly formed Google Plus community for anyone interested in conversations about standards-based or specifications-based grading

19 Responses to A Beginner’s Guide to Standards Based Grading

Hello – I am a senior studying math education at the University of Illinois. I will be student teaching Algebra 1 and Geometry next semester, both of which use Standards Based Grading methods. To be honest, prior to reading your blog post I did not have a very positive opinion of SBG. To me, it seemed like too discrete a way of assigning students an assessment score. However, the comment you stated that I really liked and will stick with me is, “I want grades to reflect a current level of understanding since I want students to aim for a continued mastery of course topics.” This really got me thinking, since I remember all the times both in high school and college when I thought, “If only I had another chance…I really knew that material, but I wasn’t in the right mindset in that moment.” You’re right…SBG allows this to happen, and from a student’s perspective, I can see why this would probably be preferred. It seems like it’s worked really well at the college level with your Calculus students. My one worry is that since I will be using this with freshmen/sophomore students in high school, they will avoid doing well on exams from the start since they know they can just retake it if they don’t do well. While it is clear your students’ motivation increased with your SBG implementation at the college level, I’m not so sure about how to make it work so effectively next semester with my high school students. Do you have any advice on strategies I can use to make it seem like the optimal strategy and have students get the most out of it?

Hi Cam! Thanks for your comment. I hope to throw together some of my thoughts in reply, but please ask me again if I miss a key concern or question.

As it turns out, many of the educators pioneering non-traditional grading approaches are in the K12 community. For example, Frank Noechese (@fnoschese on Twitter; website https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/about/) is a Physics teacher at a secondary school whose standards-based grading philosophy inspired me to make the leap. I have joined a Gooogle+ community of standards-based learning educators and we would love to have your insight as you navigate your own path — join us at https://plus.google.com/communities/117099673102877564377 . Indeed, as the community formed, a few people in the K12 community were happy to sign up. Their experiences will possibly be more aligned with what you’ll see next year than my own. I consider myself a relative newcomer to the SBG/non-traditional grading movement.

As far as your specific concern: “[T]hey will avoid doing well on exams from the start since they know they can just retake it if they don’t do well.” I was worried about this, too. What I found is that limiting the number of standards that could be attempted weekly helped quite a bit. I have 30 standards per 16 weeks, and at a one standard per week cap, students realize they must get close to mastery on at least some topics. Additionally, after the first exam, I try to encourage students as much as possible to come to my office, even if they believe they aren’t ready to re-attempt yet. Sometimes I find that what they are lacking isn’t mathematics, but instead confidence; after a brief chat, I can tell they know the material, and what they seek is encouragement instead of insight.

I think at the heart of your concern is something every educator must face — occasionally we all have students who, for whatever reason, don’t put 100% of their effort into their studies. I wish SBG was a magic wand for this issue, but it isn’t. In my experience, a student who earns a C-minus in a traditional course is very likely to earn a C-minus in my standards-based course for exactly the same reasons. As an instructor, my target is those B or C level students who have a lot of motivation & work ethic (but perhaps who lack confidence) to improve their standing. If a student is determined to fail a course, there isn’t much I can do — but if a student really wants to learn and demonstrate mastery of the material, I see it as my job to cheer them on as they work toward this goal.

I hope that this helps and that you’ll come join our Google+ community and conversation; or find me on Twitter: @katemath.

I am also a senior studying Math Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I will be student teaching next semester in a high school in Champaign that also uses SBG.

I think it’s really interesting that you were able to implement this at the college level. I’ve only heard of this being used in K-12 like you’ve mentioned in your reply to another commenter. Do you feel that this method of grading can be applied more widescale at the college level? I feel like for students who were recently introduced to SBG from a traditional style and then going back to traditional in college is unhelpful to students in the long run. What are your thoughts on this?

Hi Peter, I am hoping to develop an SBG approach in many of my college courses. Next semester, I’ll be implementing an SBG system in a very different course — “College Algebra”, which is the lowest level mathematics course offered at the College of Charleston. My process of switching to an SBG philosophy has been strongly supported by the advice, knowledge, and experience of several online colleagues. I have found that asking lots of questions has led to many fruitful conversations about these issues, so I encourage you to keep asking whatever pops to mind.

As far as students switching from SBG to traditional (or the other direction), this is something I have also wondered about. My own conclusion is that my students face a similar transition between any two instructors. For example, one instructor might focus a lot on grading homework, whereas another doesn’t grade homework but has daily graded quizzes. These challenges are common in every college experience, regardless of grading approach or philosophy. My own experience makes me believe that I should do what I feel is in the best interest of my students, even if this is a different approach than the one taken by my colleagues. I believe that having an open and honest dialogue with both groups — both my colleagues and my students — is important.

Lastly, I’ve received a lot of feedback from prior students that my SBG implementation has changed the way they approach their education for the better. They value our conversations on what it means to learn, on why I think the SBG approach is in both their interest and my own, and also on how their education is essentially their responsibility. It is my job to give them a clear picture as to what they know, where they can improve, and support that improvement whenever possible; it is their job to “do the work,” face the challenge head on, and strive to do the best that they can. I hope to be more of a cheerleader or coach for them, rather than a judge & jury. Students seem to agree that an SBG philosophy allows me to do this and they appreciate the extra work it takes, on their side and my own.

Come join our Google+ community if you’re interested in perspectives apart from my own! We are looking forward to continuing this conversation.

I have been slightly exposed to standards based grading in my last two years of college, and I like it for a few reasons. Namely, I like that it allows for better understanding of individual progress in actual learning than traditional grading, and that it redefines success by allowing students to retest and continue to demonstrate learning and improvement. You also mention several disadvantages, but many of them are results of SBG not being “mainstream”. Clearly, this post shows that standards based grading is a success for Calculus II, and probably for most other math courses, so why is it so difficult to facilitate a switch to SBG several orders of magnitude larger than a single classroom? I understand that education reform is slow to begin with, and gets slower the more you try to reform, but don’t many educators share your perspective on SBG? I know that as a student, I would appreciate standards based grading far more, as it just feels more like learning than traditional grading does. As a future teacher, I want to afford my students this opportunity, but I fear the community and department backlash for being a “new teacher” with new tools. Is there a strategy better than just buckling down and grading in this manner regardless of what anyone else says?

Hi Kyle, I am in the process of planning for next semester. I’ll be teaching several sections of our “College Algebra” course for the first time, and I’m developing an SBG-approach for this class. The class will be quite different than Calculus II. First, there will be many more first-year students. Second, many of them won’t be in science or mathematical majors. I am excited to see how they respond. Third, I’ll have many more students than I did in Calculus II. I’m hoping that it goes well; I plan to blog about what I learn at my own blog (http://blogs.cofc.edu/owensks) and also share my experiences with our Google+ community (https://plus.google.com/communities/117099673102877564377).

You mention: “I fear the community and department backlash for being a “new teacher” with new tools.” I’d be lying if I said this hadn’t crossed my mind as well, especially considering that this semester (Fall 2015) I faced my Third Year Review as part of our Tenure & Promotion process. With that said, I believe it’s my job to use my best professional judgement to figure out what I think is best for my students — meanwhile focusing on being completely transparent about the hows & whys of my choices, whether to my department, my administration, or my students. For me, I can’t imagine going back to a traditional grading philosophy because of the experiences I’ve had in my SBG courses. In outlining the “hows and whys” in my T&P documents, I found that my colleagues were very supportive of my non-traditional approach. After ten years in the university classroom, I have found all the departments I’ve worked with to be places that welcome innovation, so long as that innovation is well-supported by strong professional judgment and honest, ongoing conversations.

Come join our Google+ community and see if everyone else will echo my experience. (I’d be curious to know what they have thought throughout their careers!) Check out https://plus.google.com/communities/117099673102877564377 .

The SBG system is a great step forward in the way teachers and professors approach learning. Speaking from personal experience, this system of grading allows for students to learn at their own pace, to be in charge of their own mastery of the material, and ultimately reinforces the subject matter. With this system, it also prevents one “bad day” from tanking the students grade. Of course their are limits to where and how the SBG system can be applied, but for Calc II, it worked beautifully. Dr. Owens was able to teach one of the best — and yet one of the hardest — classes I’ve ever taken, while allowing me to learn at a rate that suited me and promoted my learning. At least for every math class I have ever taken, SBG would’ve improved the experience by promoting learning as opposed to memorizing.

I have been exposes to SBG along with the concept of visual learning and I have fallen in love with the idea of both of these, but I am getting nervous implementing them in my classroom. I appreciated that you highlighted the pros and the cons that you discovered. The thing that encourages me the most about your review is that you said in your office, discussion went from partial credit to math topics. Isn’t that what the discussions should be? Student learning seems like it would increase so much if students were concerned about learning, not their grade. I think the fact that you said student buy-in is crucial and your four questions are exactly on point. One thing I am really nervous about is the amount of time it seemed as though you put in – and you mentioned that it was for smaller class sizes. Do you have any advice for SBG in a high school with 35 kids to a classroom and 6 difference classes? I think it would be a great benefit to my students and school to move toward SBG but I am afraid to take that first step.

Hi Ali, I was nervous too, before my first SBG class. I think this is just part of the process we all go through when making big changes to our courses. As far as particular advice about your high student count (35*6), I would suggest designing a system that is easy (perhaps Pass/No Pass?) and somewhat automated — for example, if you have access to test generation software, using that to create multiple versions of a single re-assessment rather than having to write each one individually. You’re welcome to join our Google+ community (the link is above) and there you might find people whose SBG experience is more akin to your situation & who can offer even more insight than I can. Good luck 🙂

This is amazing! I do have one question for you: How do you go about recording your grades? What gradebook program do you use?

Same question. Also, on the retakes … were there problems about access? I mean, that some students could make the office hours and others could not?

Hi Kevin. I didn’t have any access problems. I tried to schedule my office hours around times I knew the students would be free. Occasionally, I’d set up an appointment to meet with someone if they really had a conflict. In cases of a busy week, our admin assistants help us proctor, so rarely (once or twice) I left a re-assessment quiz with them for a student to take during normal business hours. I didn’t like this option since I always wanted to sit down and chat with the student before they tried another problem, just to help clear up any underlying misunderstandings of the material.

Since writing this post, I’ve started using our online LMS gradebook. It isn’t a great fix. For example, since students take quizzes a different number of times, this data can’t really be stored in the gradebook. We have a D2L product. I did figure out how to do a “Selectbox” grade, so I have my EMRN system there. I have one column per standard and I update the dropdown menu each time a student makes an attempt at a standard. I also save some data in Excel on my office computer where I feel like I have more control over how calculations are handled.

Hope this helps!

Hi, I am a high school math teacher that teaches a variety of classes from Algebra 1 to co-teaching Dual Credit College Algebra. I really am interested in SBG because it sounds like it focuses more students on math topics instead of their grade all the time. I come across the topic of grades almost every day and I really feel like students are so wrapped up in the grade that they aren’t really learning as much; instead they are trying to memorize. I already implement a rework process within my regular grading system because I really like to see my students find their errors and learn from them. However, I don’t know how well SBG would work in the high school setting. Is SBG something that should be implemented school-wide to help the students understand the process or will in not matter if I am the only one in the high school to implement this? How many of your colleagues use this same system?

Hi Kristie,

So far, none of my colleagues in my department are using an SBG approach. However, there are a few folks around the university who are trying either specifications grading or SBG outside of the math department. I think your students would benefit from this approach even if you’re the only one using it.

Thank you for sharing!! I have just started my 3rd year at a High School and am teaching a new prealgebra course with students who have failed math classes in the past. I felt the SBG would be a good way to get these students back into a growth mindset. So far they have fought against it quite a bit, but mainly because they don’t like change. They also seem opposed to not having extra credit opportunities. I am curious, do you have any thing in SBG that is similar to extra credit?

I felt like EC wouldn’t really fit a SBG approach where learning must be shown. Sinced once you show you have mastered a standard, your grade will reflect that growth and the EC would not be needed.

Kate, This post is one of the most concise and comprehensive sources on Mastery-Based Grading I’ve read. And I’ve read a lot, because I am currently creating my Mastery model. Right now I am struggling with balancing my general and specific outcomes. This is why I am especially interested in your 6 Big Questions and how your specific standards answer these questions. Here is my question: Have you used these Big Questions in your grading in any way? How were they present in your system? In other words, did they play any other role other than helping to create a meaningful structure of the course (which is already a lot!)? Thank you!!!

One of the big struggles with moving to an SBG system is you really have to figure out what it is you want your students to learn. For me, using Big Questions has been really helpful in my course prep because it focuses my attention on what the point of the course is. Also, in past semesters, I’ve often asked students on the final exam “What were the Big Questions in this course?” and I’ve been really impressed with their responses.

I realize that my students will probably, at some point, forget how to do things I’ve taught them (think: quotient rule! integration by parts!). And I think I’m OK with this. What I would like them to remember from my course, even if they forget the details about the methods we’ve implemented, is what kinds of questions we were asking. So in my instruction and documentation, I try to make clear “This is the Big Question we’re struggling with right now”.

So, specifically: 1. I don’t think the Big Questions really are part of their grade (although sometimes I ask my students if they remember them or not). 2. They are present in my system as an organization tool, both when I’m writing my standards at the start of the course, and also as a structure within the semester to bring the conversation back to “What are we even trying to do today?”

I hope this helps!

Thank you Kate, it definitely does! And I can see how important it is for a Calculus course. My general outcomes/big questions for a high school Algebra 2 course may not be so profound, although just like in Calculus, I’d like my student to internalize big ideas about relationships between real world processes, functions, equations, graphs etc. rather than necessary particular types of equations and graphs. So I can totally accept your philosophy and practice! Thanks again, Yelena

This sounds great for math or science classes. I teach high school history, and we focus on citizenship along with reading and writing using evidence to support claims. I find that many of my students come to ninth grade without any knowledge about their country due to more emphasis on reading and math. Elementary grades have stopped teaching history to make sure kids are reading better (and they are not) or working on new math techniques. In using standards based grading for history, how will I be able to assess students’ knowledge based on the state standards accurately. Much of history is based on knowledge. One cannot write about history without learning the basics. When a student reaches the high school level, they should be able to read and write in an acceptable manner, but we all know students are passed on, and I believe part of the problem is this re-do until they get it. I do not think all students will always get it. Life does not always offer second chances, but that is what we are teaching them. That is why we have students who fail, especially when they try college. I know this will not be read or responded to, but I am very skeptical of passing everyone.

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Uncategorized   |   Oct 5, 2011

Grading Made Simple

By Angela Watson

Founder and Writer

If you’re looking for a more efficient method of grading papers and assessing student progress, you’ve come to the right place. On this page (which has been adapted from  The Cornerstone book ), you’ll learn tips and tricks to help you gauge student progress quickly and easily.

Using simple and consistent markings

Choose your color for grading and use it exclusively.  I use red because it stands out well and makes it clear to parents and kids what I have written vs. what they have written (my kids often correct their own papers using blue pens). Red is the traditional teacher color, and I think that some of us as adults are kind of scarred from seeing red marks on our papers as kids.  However, a young child hasn’t had those types of experiences and therefore there are no negative connotations. I also use red ink for all of my stamps, so my kids associate red with positive messages, too.

I think seeing numerous corrections can be intimidating in any color, so it’s more important to focus on what types of marks you are making on the paper.  Be sure to use simple, quick markings, and be consistent with them.  For example, I don’t make big Xs by or circle wrong answers, I just draw a slash through the problem numbers.

Try not to make more work for yourself.  I once knew a teacher who wrote the correct answers next to wrong ones on EVERY student paper. That’s great for the kid and parent (assuming they actually read each paper) but it took her a half an hour just to grade a set of spelling tests!  Another teacher I know circles the correct answers and leaves the incorrect ones alone.  This helps build student confidence and makes marks from the teacher a good thing (the more, the better!) rather than a bad thing.  I love this concept, but again, I wouldn’t do it for the whole class because it is too time-consuming.

Keep papers from piling up

Try not to let students’ ungraded work sit out on your desk: until you’re ready to grade, leave it in the file trays where kids turned it in.  Messy piles accumulate so quickly!  If you have a good filing system, it should take less than ten seconds to find any stack of ungraded student work in your filing trays.  Use the ideas in Chapter 4 of  The Cornerstone  book (which is about  Avoiding the Paper Trap ), so there will be no more confusion about what’s already been entered into the computer grade book, what’s has been graded and what hasn’t, etc.

Don’t let papers go ungraded for more than a week, tops.  This is easier said than done!  However, more than once I have been in the middle of grading a tedious math worksheet when I realized I had already tested the kids on the material.  What’s the point of grading the practice class work at that point?  It was too late for me to assess whether or not the kids were getting it, and because I never provided them feedback on how they did, it’s possible that a number of them had used the assignment to practice incorrect strategies.  It was a waste of time for me and them.

Finding time to grade

In the past, I’ve set aside certain times of the day to grade papers, such as during students’ Morning Work, while the kids used math centers or completed cooperative projects (and therefore were being pretty independent), or right after dismissal.  Every day during the predetermined time, I tackled whatever papers the kids had created since the day before.  This was a very effective way to make sure that papers never piled up, and was manageable because my students completed most of their written work in workbooks and journals which are not graded.

I know other teachers who stay after school one day per week to catch up on their grading, and that works well for them. However, when I stay late to work on tedious tasks, I find that I have less enthusiasm and energy the next day in the classroom. For my own sanity, I get my grading done during the school day.

Taking papers home to grade

Although I’ve never regularly taken papers home, I do have an organized file folder system for transporting and keeping track of papers that I prefer to grade at my house.  Sometimes I’ve used  three folders for each subject (class work, homework, and tests); other years I just had one folder for each subject.  Additional folders can also be useful:

• Already graded—to be entered in computer: I kept my grades electronically and put papers in this folder until the grades were entered.
• Already in computer—to be filed: I would empty this folder into the basket of papers for students to take home.
• To review/redo with class: When there were a lot of errors I wanted to go over, I placed the papers in this folder.
• Incomplete: These would be stapled to weekly evaluations on Friday as weekend homework.
• Make-up work: I normally graded make-up work every two weeks and kept it in this folder until I was ready to correct them.
• No names: I filled this file if I was going to try to find the papers’ owners later or give kids a chance to claim them.

Tips for grading student writing quickly

I realize it can be difficult (and time consuming) to think of original, carefully-worded, and encouraging comments for students, so I created this 21 page PDF of  Feedback Comments for Student Writing . It contains hundreds of comment suggestions you can use for written feedback. The comments can also be used to guide your conversations during writing workshop and writing conferences, and to describe student writing for portfolio assessments, progress reports, report cards, or in parent conferences.

Often, you can also simplify the grading process for students’ writing. I use one trait (or single trait) rubrics to help refine my writing instruction, help students better understand characteristics of effective writing and how their work is assessed, and simplify the scoring process.

The idea is simple: since we teach traits of effective writing individually, why not assess traits individually sometimes, too? Not every piece of writing needs a full assessment, and one trait rubrics make it easy for teachers to give meaningful feedback quickly without spending hours grading essays.  Additionally, assessing student writing is a subjective process that is often a mystery to students and parents: using a straightforward rubric with only 3 or 4 criteria makes it clear why an assignment earned the grade it did. It also prevents you from downgrading a paper by weighting one aspect of good writing too heavily. Concentrating on only one trait makes it easier for the teacher to fairly assess a student’s skills in a particular trait.

The system is beneficial for students, too. It can be overwhelming (especially for younger children, reluctant writers, and English language learners) to try to concentrate on all aspects of great writing at one time. Knowing that they’ll only be assessed on a single trait helps students narrows their focus and makes the task more manageable.

You can read more ideas in my blog post,  10 time-saving tips for grading student writing .

Tips for quickly assigning formal grades

Use a slide chart grading aid (easy grader)..

This little device allows you to have any number of problems or questions in an assignment and calculates the grade.  The easy grader prevents you from having to choose a basic number of questions for an assignment, such as 20, in order to make each question worth 5 points each.  With a grading aid, having 27 or 34 questions is no problem.  You can buy these for about $5 at teacher supply stores, or  download a free one  from my site.  The quickgra.de website  will calculate the same way for free online.

Grade an assignment on criteria for multiple subject areas.

If you assign a reading passage with questions about living organisms, you can take reading AND science grades from the same assignment.  A population graph activity may provide you with social studies AND math grades.  At the top of students’ papers, write the subject area and grade for each, e.g., ‘Rdng- B, Sci- A’.

Collect grades from several workbook pages at a time.

This is a useful strategy for grading assignments in workbooks when children aren’t supposed to rip the pages out.  It works best when you need the grades for documentation purposes and don’t need them for information on student progress.  Collect the workbooks and record grades all at once for several assignments by flipping to the page numbers that students completed.  You can even have students fold down the page corners to help you find them more easily.  This process is much more efficient than collecting workbooks or journals after every single assignment.  If for some reason you must do it that way, have students stack their workbooks while they’re still open to the right page so you don’t have to flip through them.

When grading multi-page assignments, grade the first page for each student, the second page for each student, and so on, rather than grading the entire test for one student at a time.

This is an invaluable tip that I learned years back, and it has saved me countless hours.  When grading one page at a time, you tend to memorize the answers, making it easier to spot errors.  If there are a lot of problems on each page, write the number the student got wrong at the bottom of the page, such as –0 or –3, and then after you have graded the whole stack, go back through and count up how many each student got wrong by looking at the minus-however-many that you wrote at the bottom of the pages.

Use accurate student papers instead of making answer keys.

After the first quarter of the school year, you’ll have a pretty good idea about which students will have the right answers on their papers.  If you don’t have an answer key for an assignment, check two or three of those students’ papers against each other first, and find one that is basically correct.  Mark corrections for any mistakes on the paper, then use it to check all other students’ work against.  This is much quicker than making an answer key, and if you photocopy the child’s paper, you can save it and use it for the key again the following year.

Make an answer key transparency.

For lengthy assignments or those you plan to use for several years, make photocopies of bubble sheets (like those used on standardized tests—check the back of your teacher’s guides) and have your students fill in the bubbles instead of writing answers on the test or blank paper.  Make an answer key on a blank transparency using a permanent marker.  When you are ready to grade, place the transparency over a student’s paper and count how many bubbles don’t match up between the student’s sheet and the answer transparency.  I grade my students’ Scholastic Reading Inventory tests this way and can get through an entire class set (45 questions each) in less than 10 minutes.

Tips for keeping a grade book and averaging grades

Give letter grades instead of percentages..

Not every school district allows this, and not all teachers like the idea, but this will save you so much time!  Essentially, instead of having to calculate the exact percentage a child earned, such as 84%, you just write “B” in your grade book.  This makes it much easier to glance over your grades and see how a child is doing and also how well the class as a whole scored on a particular assignment.  At the end of the marking period, average the letters out mentally, or if the grade isn’t immediately clear, assign each letter a point and average it that way (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1).  If your report cards don’t allow for plusses and minuses to be given, this makes even more sense.  Grading isn’t rocket science in elementary school—don’t make your job unnecessarily difficult.

Only use weighted grades if your district mandates that you do so.

Have every assignment count equally, instead of weighting tests to be equal to 50% of students’ overall grades, homework as 25%, and so on.  This will save you massive amounts of time at the end of the quarter.

Simplify the way you calculate homework grades.

At the end of the quarter, I simple go through and count up how many assignments were missing.  If there were 42 homework assignments given in a marking period and a child did not turn in 3, she gets a 39/42 and the computer automatically translates that into a letter grade and percentage out of 100.  If your district requires you to assess homework separately for report cards, then that’s your grade.  If your district expects homework to be included in each subject area’s average, you may be able to use the same homework grade for every subject, rather than differentiate with a reading homework grade, math homework grade, etc.  After all, children are either doing homework or they’re not, and that choice will usually impact their grades in all subjects equally.  Also, if you rarely give social studies, science, or health homework, combining all the homework assignments ensures you will have a homework grade in every subject.

Use a digital  grade book.

I was hesitant to start this method because I thought it would be a pain to have to record grades and then enter them in the computer, but if you back up your files, you don’t have to keep a paper grade book at all!  A computerized grade book allows you to pull up a child’s average at any point (such as when a parent calls), and at the end of the quarter, all you have to do is print out the grades.

Angela Watson

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About bubble sheet grading, we have lengthy reading and math benchmark tests three times a year. We used a laminated bubble sheet (before we started using Scantrons) and then hole punched the correct answers. All you had to do to score the test was place your key on top of a student’s answer sheet then mark a slash in any answers that didn’t match up. It was so fast and easy!!

This is a great tip, Jill! I’ve done something similar with transparencies as the answer key (you make a transparency of the answer key and then lay the transparency over the child’s answer sheet and slash to the left of the problem where the bubbles don’t line up). I like the hole punch idea better because you can mark the correct answer for the student through the hole. Cool!

This article has been so helpful. I am a first year teacher and I have been caught in the paper trap. I refuse to have this continue to happen to me year after year. Everything you described has happened to me. I especially want to return graded papers back to my students in a timely manner. None of my colleagues had a CLEAR suggestion on how to MANAGE GRADES and NOT let the grades MANAGE ME! Thank you again , I will strive for the upcoming school year to be more efficient. Sincerely, Yvette

Hi, Yvette! I, too, found that teachers would tell me not to get stressed out about grading, but never clearly explained how to do that! It’s difficult to find a process that works and even more difficult to explain it. But once I figured it out, I knew I had to write it down so other teachers could benefit!

There are lots more ideas for grading in The Cornerstone book. The ‘paper trap’ chapter would probably be very helpful for you, too, because it explains step by step how to create a place for EVERY paper you come across. 🙂

• Pingback: Grading Strategies | School Outfitters Blog

I’m returning to teaching after being gone for 16 years. Your tips have helped alleviate some of my anxiety. I intend to use several tips. Thanks so much.

I appreciate your kind words. Welcome back!

Thank you very much Iam a new teacher ,your grading is very helpful . Venessa

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IM 6–12 Math: Grading and Homework Policies and Practices

By Jennifer Willson,  Director, 6–12 Professional Learning Design

In my role at IM, working with teachers and administrators, I am asked to help with the challenges of implementing an IM curriculum. One of the most common challenges is: how can we best align these materials to our homework and grading practices? This question is a bit different from “How should we assess student learning?” or “How should we use assessment to inform instruction?” 

When we created the curriculum, we chose not to prescribe homework assignments or decide which student work should count as a graded event. This was deliberate—homework policies and grading practices are highly variable, localized, and values-driven shared understandings that evolve over time. For example, the curriculum needed to work for schools where nightly, graded assignments are expected; schools where no work done outside of class is graded; and schools who take a feedback-only approach for any formative work.

IM 6–8 Math was released in 2017, and IM Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 in 2019. In that time, I’ve been able to observe some patterns in the ways schools and teachers align the materials to their local practices. So, while we’re still not going to tell you what to do, we’re now in a position to describe some trends and common ways in which schools and districts make use of the materials to meet their local constraints. Over the past four years, I have heard ideas from teachers, administrators, and IM certified facilitators. In December, I invited our IM community to respond to a survey to share grading and homework policies and practices. In this post I am sharing a compilation of results from the 31 teachers who responded to the survey, as well as ideas from conversations with teachers and IMCFs. We hope that you find some ideas here to inform and inspire your classroom.

How do teachers collect student responses?

Most teachers who responded to the survey collect student work for assessments in a digital platform such as LearnZillion, McGraw-Hill, ASSISTments, Edulastic, Desmos, etc. Others have students upload their work (photo, PDF, etc.) to a learning management system such as Canvas or Google classroom. Even fewer ask students to respond digitally to questions in their learning management system.

How do teachers tend to score each type of assessment, and how is feedback given?

The table shows a summary of how teachers who responded to the survey most often provide feedback for the types of assessments included in the curriculum.

How are practice problems used?

Every lesson in the curriculum (with a very small number of exceptions) includes a short set of cumulative practice problems. Each set could be used as an assignment done in class after the lesson or worked on outside of class, but teachers make use of these items in a variety of ways to meet their students’ learning needs.

While some teachers use the practice problems that are attached to each lesson as homework, others do not assign work outside of class. Here are some other purposes for which teachers use the practice problems:

• extra practice
• student reflection
• as examples to discuss in class or use for a mini-lesson
• as a warm-up question to begin class
• as group work during class

How do teachers structure time and communication to “go over” practice problems?

It’s common practice to assemble practice problems into assignments that are worked on outside of class meeting time. Figuring out what works best for students to get feedback on practice problems while continuing to move students forward in their learning and work through the next lesson can be challenging. 

Here are some ways teachers describe how they approach this need:

• We don’t have time to go over homework every day, but I do build in one class period per section to pause and look at some common errors in cool-downs and invite students to do some revisions where necessary, then I also invite students to look at select practice problems. I collect some practice problems along with cool-downs and use that data to inform what, if anything, I address with the whole class or with a small group.
• Students vote for one practice problem that they thought was challenging, and we spend less than five minutes to get them started. We don’t necessarily work through the whole problem.
• I post solutions to practice problems, sometimes with a video of my solution strategy, so that students can check their work.
• I assign practice problems, post answers, invite students to ask questions (they email me or let me know during the warm-up), and then give section quizzes that are closely aligned to the practice problems, which is teaching my students that asking questions is important.
• I invite students to vote on the most challenging problem and then rather than go over the practice problem I weave it into the current day’s lesson so that students recognize “that’s just like that practice problem!” What I find important is moving students to take responsibility to evaluate their own understanding of the practice problems and not depend on me (the teacher) or someone else to check them. Because my district requires evidence of a quiz and grade each week and I preferred to use my cool-downs formatively, I placed the four most highly requested class practice problems from the previous week on the quiz which I substituted for that day’s cool-down. That saved me quiz design time, there were no surprises for the students, and after about four weeks of consistency with this norm, the students quickly learned that they should not pass up their opportunity to study for the quiz by not only completing the 4–5 practice problems nightly during the week, but again, by reflecting on their own depth of understanding and being ready to give me focused feedback about their greatest struggle on a daily basis.
• I see the practice problems as an opportunity to allow students to go at different paces. It’s more work, but I include extension problems and answers to each practice problem with different strategies and misconceptions underneath. When students are in-person for class, they work independently or in pairs moving to the printed answer keys posted around the room for each problem. They initial under different prompts on the answer key (tried more than one strategy, used a DNL, used a table, made a mistake, used accurate units, used a strategy that’s not on here…) It gives the students and I more feedback when I collect the responses later and allows me to be more present with smaller groups while students take responsibility for checking their work. It also gets students up and moving around the room and normalizes multiple approaches as well as making mistakes as part of the problem solving process.

Quizzes—How often, and how are they made?

Most of the teachers give quizzes—a short graded assessment completed individually under more controlled conditions than other assignments. How often is as varied as the number of teachers who responded: one per unit, twice per unit, once a week, two times per week, 2–3 times per quarter.

If teachers don’t write quiz items themselves or with their team, the quiz items come from practice problems, activities, and adapted cool-downs.

When and how do students revise their work?

Policies for revising work are also as varied as the number of teachers who responded. 

Here are some examples:

• Students are given feedback as they complete activities and revise based on their feedback.
• Students revise cool-downs and practice problems.
• Students can revise end-of-unit assessments and cool-downs.
• Students can meet with me at any time to increase a score on previous work.
• Students revise cool-downs if incorrect, and they are encouraged to ask for help if they can’t figure out their own error.
• Students can revise graded assignments during office hours to ensure successful completion of learning goals.
• Students are given a chance to redo assignments after I work with them individually.
• Students can review and revise their Desmos activities until they are graded.
• We make our own retake versions of the assessments.
• Students can do error logs and retakes on summative assessments.
• We complete the student facing tasks together as a whole class on Zoom in ASSISTments. If a student needs to revise the answers they notify me during the session.

Other advice and words of wisdom

I also asked survey participants for any other strategies that both have and haven’t worked in their classrooms. Here are some responses.

What have you tried that has not worked?

• Going over practice problems with the whole class every day. The ones who need it most often don’t benefit from the whole-class instruction, and the ones who don’t need it distract those who do. 
• Grading work on the tasks within the lessons for accuracy
• Leaving assignments open for the length of the semester so that students can always see unfinished work
• Going through problems on the board with the whole class does not correct student errors
• Most students don’t check feedback comments unless you look at them together
• Grading images of student work on the classroom activity tasks uploaded by students in our learning management systems
• Providing individual feedback on google classroom assignments was time consuming and inefficient
• Allowing students to submit late and missing work with no penalty
• Trying to grade everything
• Below grade 9, homework really does not work.
• Going over every practice problem communicates that students do not really think about the practice problems on their own. 

What else have you tried that has worked well?

• My students do best when I consistently assign practice problems. I have tried giving them an assignment once a week but most students lose track. It is better to give 2–3 problems or reflective prompts after every class, which also helps me get ahead of misconceptions.
• I don’t grade homework since I am unsure who completes it with or for the students.
• A minimum score of 50% on assignments, which allows students the opportunity to recover, in terms of their grade in the class
• Time constraints imposed during remote learning impact the amount and type of homework I give as well as what I grade
• Give fewer problems than normal on second chance assignments
• I have used platforms such as Kahoot to engage students in IM material. I also build Google Forms to administer the Check Your Readiness pre-assessment and End-of-Unit assessments, but I may start using ASSISTments for this in the future.
• The value of homework in high school is okay, but personally I skip good for great.
• Students are able to go back and revise their independent practice work upon recognizing their mistakes and learning further about how to solve the problems.
• Sometimes I select only one or two slides to grade instead of the whole set when I use Desmos activities.
• Allow for flexibility in timing. Give students opportunities for revision.
• Frequent short assessments are better than longer tests, and they allow students to focus on specific skills and get feedback more frequently.
• Especially during the pandemic, many of my students are overwhelmed and underachieving. I am focusing on the core content.
• Homework assignments consist of completing Desmos activities students began in class. Additional slides contain IM practice problems.
• I am only grading the summative assessment for accuracy and all else for completion. I want the students to know that they have the room to learn, try new strategies and be wrong while working on formative assessments.

What grading and homework policies have worked for you and your students that aren’t listed? Share your ideas in the comments so that we can all learn from your experience.

What would you like to learn more about? Let us know in the comments, and it will help us design future efforts like this one so that we can all learn more in a future blog post.

We are grateful to the teachers and facilitators who took the time to share their learning with us.

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The Ultimate Guide to Grading Student Work

Strategies, best practices and practical examples to make your grading process more efficient, effective and meaningful

Top Hat Staff

This ultimate guide to grading student work offers strategies, tips and examples to help you make the grading process more efficient and effective for you and your students. The right approach can save time for other teaching tasks, like lecture preparation and student mentoring. 

Grading is one of the most painstaking responsibilities of postsecondary teaching. It’s also one of the most crucial elements of the educational process. Even with an efficient system, grading requires a great deal of time—and even the best-laid grading systems are not entirely immune to student complaints and appeals. This guide explores some of the common challenges in grading student work along with proven grading techniques and helpful tips to communicate expectations and set you and your students up for success, especially those who are fresh out of high school and adjusting to new expectations in college or university. 

What is grading?

Grading is only one of several indicators of a student’s comprehension and mastery, but understanding what grading entails is essential to succeeding as an educator. It allows instructors to provide standardized measures to evaluate varying levels of academic performance while providing students valuable feedback to help them gauge their own understanding of course material and skill development. Done well, effective grading techniques show learners where they performed well and in what areas they need improvement. Grading student work also gives instructors insights into how they can improve the student learning experience.

Grading challenges: Clarity, consistency and fairness

No matter how experienced the instructor is, grading student work can be tricky. No such grade exists that perfectly reflects a student’s overall comprehension or learning. In other words, some grades end up being inaccurate representations of actual comprehension and mastery. This is often the case when instructors use an inappropriate grading scale, such as a pass/fail structure for an exam, when a 100-point system gives a more accurate or nuanced picture.

Grading students’ work fairly but consistently presents other challenges. For example, grades for creative projects or essays might suffer from instructor bias, even with a consistent rubric in place. Instructors can employ every strategy they know to ensure fairness, accessibility, accuracy and consistency, and even so, some students will still complain about their grades. Handling grade point appeals can pull instructors away from other tasks that need their attention.

Many of these issues can be avoided by breaking things down into logical steps. First, get clear on the learning outcomes you seek to achieve, then ensure the coursework students will engage in is well suited to evaluating those outcomes and last, identify the criteria you will use to assess student performance. 

What are some grading strategies for educators?

There are a number of grading techniques that can alleviate many problems associated with grading, including the perception of inconsistent, unfair or arbitrary practices. Grading can use up a large portion of educators’ time. However, the results may not improve even if the time you spend on it does. Grading, particularly in large class sizes, can leave instructors feeling burnt out. Those who are new to higher education can fall into a grading trap, where far too much of their allocated teaching time is spent on grading. As well, after the graded assignments have been handed back, there may be a rush of students wanting either to contest the grade, or understand why they got a particular grade, which takes up even more of the instructor’s time. With some dedicated preparation time, careful planning and thoughtful strategies, grading student work can be smooth and efficient. It can also provide effective learning opportunities for the students and good information for the instructor about the student learning (or lack of) taking place in the course. These grading strategies can help instructors improve their accuracy in capturing student performance . 

Establishing clear grading criteria

Setting grading criteria helps reduce the time instructors spend on actual grading later on. Such standards add consistency and fairness to the grading process, making it easier for students to understand how grading works. Students also have a clearer understanding of what they need to do to reach certain grade levels.

Establishing clear grading criteria also helps instructors communicate their performance expectations to students. Furthermore, clear grading strategies give educators a clearer picture of content to focus on and how to assess subject mastery. This can help avoid so-called ‘busywork’ by ensuring each activity aligns clearly to the desired learning outcome. 

Step 1: Determine the learning outcomes and the outputs to measure performance. Does assessing comprehension require quizzes and/or exams, or will written papers better capture what the instructor wants to see from students’ performance? Perhaps lab reports or presentations are an ideal way of capturing specific learning objectives, such as behavioral mastery.

Step 2: Establish criteria to determine how you will evaluate assigned work. Is it precision in performing steps, accuracy in information recall, or thoroughness in expression? To what extent will creativity factor in the assessment?

Step 3: Determine the grade weight or value for each assignment. These weights represent the relative importance of each assignment toward the final grade and a student’s GPA. For example, how much will the final exam count relative to a research paper or essay? Once the weights are in place, it’s essential to stratify grades that distinguish performance levels. For example:

• A grade = excellent
• B grade = very good
• C grade = adequate
• D grade = poor but passing
• F grade = unacceptable

Making grading efficient

Grading efficiency depends a great deal on devoting appropriate amounts of time to certain grading tasks. For instance, some assignments deserve less attention than others. That’s why some outcomes, like attendance or participation work, can help save time by getting a simple pass/fail grade or acknowledgment of completion using a check/check-plus/check-minus scale.

However, other assignments like tests or papers need to show more in-depth comprehension of the course material. These items need more intricate scoring schemes and require more time to evaluate, especially if student responses warrant feedback.

When appropriate, multiple-choice questions can provide a quick grading technique. They also provide the added benefit of grading consistency among all students completing the questions. However, multiple-choice questions are more difficult to write than most people realize. These questions are most useful when information recall and conceptual understanding are the primary learning outcomes.

Instructors can maximize their time for more critical educational tasks by creating scheduled grading strategies and sticking to it. A spreadsheet is also essential for calculating many students’ grades quickly and exporting data to other platforms.

Making grading more meaningful in higher education

Grading student work is more than just routine, despite what some students believe. The better students understand what instructors expect them to take away from the course, the more meaningful the grading structure will be. Meaningful grading strategies reflect effective assignments, which have distinct goals and evaluation criteria. It also helps avoid letting the grading process take priority over teaching and mentoring.

Leaving thoughtful and thorough comments does more than rationalize a grade. Providing feedback is another form of teaching and helps students better understand the nuances behind the grade. Suppose a student earns a ‘C’ on a paper. If the introduction was outstanding, but the body needed improvement, comments explaining this distinction will give a clearer picture of what the ‘C’ grade represents as opposed to ‘A-level’ work.

Instructors should limit comments to elements of their work that students can actually improve or build upon. Above all, comments should pertain to the original goal of the assignment. Excessive comments that knit-pick a student’s work are often discouraging and overwhelming, leaving the student less able or willing to improve their effort on future projects. Instead, instructors should provide comments that point to patterns of strengths and areas needing improvement. It’s also helpful to leave a summary comment at the end of the assignment or paper.

Maintaining a complaint-free grading system

In many instances, an appropriate response to a grade complaint might simply be, “It’s in the syllabus.” Nevertheless, one of the best strategies to curtail grade complaints is to limit or prohibit discussions of grades during class time. Inform students that they can discuss grades outside of class or during office hours.

Instructors can do many things before the semester or term begins to reduce grade complaints. This includes detailed explanations in the grading system’s syllabus, the criteria for earning a particular letter grade, policies on late work, and other standards that inform grading. It also doesn’t hurt to remind students of each assignment’s specific grading criteria before it comes due. Instructors should avoid changing their grading policies; doing so will likely lead to grade complaints.

Assigning student grades

Since not all assignments may count equally toward a final course grade, instructors should figure out which grading scales are appropriate for each assignment. They should also consider that various assignments assess student work differently; therefore, their grading structure should reflect those differences. For example, some exams might warrant a 100-point scale rather than a pass/fail grade. Requirements like attendance or class participation might be used to reward effort; therefore, merely completing that day’s requirement is sufficient.

Grading essays and open-ended writing

Some writing projects might seem like they require more subjective grading standards than multiple-choice tests. However, instructors can implement objective standards to maintain consistency while acknowledging students’ individual approaches to the project.

Instructors should create a rubric or chart against which they evaluate each assignment. A rubric contains specific grading criteria and the point value for each. For example, out of 100 points, a rubric specifies that a maximum of 10 points are given to the introduction. Furthermore, an instructor can include even more detailed elements that an introduction should include, such as a thesis statement, attention-getter, and preview of the paper’s main points.

Grading creative work

While exams, research papers, and math problems tend to have more finite grading criteria, creative works like short films, poetry, or sculptures can seem more difficult to grade. Instructors might apply technical evaluations that adhere to disciplinary standards. However, there is the challenge of grading how students apply their subject talent and judgment to a finished product.

For creative projects that are more visual, instructors might ask students to submit a written statement along with their assignment. This statement can provide a reflection or analysis of the finished product, or describe the theory or concept the student used. This supplement can add insight that informs the grade.

Grading for multi-section courses

Professors or course coordinators who oversee several sections of a course have the added responsibility of managing other instructors or graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) in addition to their own grading. Course directors need to communicate regularly and consistently with all teaching staff about the grading standards and criteria to ensure they are applied consistently across all sections.

If possible, the course director should address students from all sections in one gathering to explain the criteria, expectations, assignments, and other policies. TAs should continue to communicate grading-related information to the students in their classes. They also should maintain contact with each other and the course director to address inconsistencies, stay on top of any changes and bring attention to problems.

To maintain consistency and objectivity across all sections, the course director might consider assigning TAs to grade other sections besides their own. Another strategy that can save time and maintain consistency is to have each TA grade only one exam portion. It’s also vital to compare average grades and test scores across sections to see if certain groups of students are falling behind or if some classes need changes in their teaching strategies.

Types of grading

• Absolute grading : A grading system where instructors explain performance standards before the assignment is completed. grades are given based on predetermined cutoff levels. Here, each point value is assigned a letter grade. Most schools adopt this system, where it’s possible for all students to receive an A.
• Relative grading : An assessment system where higher education instructors determine student grades by comparing them against those of their peers. 
• Weighted grades : A method ussed in higher education to determine how different assessments should count towards the final grade. An instructor may choose to make the results of an exam worth 50 percent of a student’s total class grade, while assignments account for 25 percent and participation marks are worth another 25 percent.
• Grading on a curve : This system adjusts student grades to ensure that a test or assignment has the proper distribution throughout the class (for example, only 20% of students receive As, 30% receive Bs, and so on), as well as a desired total average (for example, a C grade average for a given test). We’ve covered this type of grading in more detail in the blog post The Ultimate Guide to Grading on A Curve .

Ungrading is an education model that prioritizes giving feedback and encouraging learning through self-reflection rather than a letter grade. Some instructors argue that grades cannot objectively assess a student’s work. Even when calculated down to the hundredth of a percentage point, a “B+” on an English paper doesn’t paint a complete picture about what a student can do, what they understand or where they need help. Alfie Kohn, lecturer on human behavior, education, and parenting, says that the basis for grades is often subjective and uninformative. Even the final grade on a STEM assignment is more of a reflection of how the assignment was written, rather than the student’s mastery of the subject matter. So what are educators who have adopted ungrading actually doing? Here are some practices and strategies that decentralize the role of assessments in the higher ed classroom.

• Frequent feedback: Rather than a final paper or exam, encourage students to write letters to reflect on their progress and learning throughout the term. Students are encouraged to reflect on and learn from both their successes and their failures, both individually and with their peers. In this way, conversations and commentary become the primary form of feedback, rather than a letter grade. 
• Opportunities for self-reflection: Open-ended questions help students to think critically about their learning experiences. Which course concepts have you mastered? What have you learned that you are most excited about? Simple questions like these help guide students towards a more insightful understanding of themselves and their progress in the course.
• Increasing transparency: Consider informal drop-in sessions or office hours to answer student questions about navigating a new style of teaching and learning.  The ungrading process has to begin from a place of transparency and openness in order to build trust. Listening to and responding to student concerns is vital to getting students on board. But just as important is the quality of feedback provided, ensuring both instructors and students remain on the same page.

Grading on a curve

Instructors will grade on a curve to allow for a specific distribution of scores, often referred to as “normal distribution.” To ensure there is a specific percentage of students receiving As, Bs, Cs and so forth, the instructor can manually adjust grades. 

When displayed visually, the distribution of grades ideally forms the shape of a bell. A small number of students will do poorly, another small group will excel and most will fall somewhere in the middle. Students whose grades settle in the middle will receive a C-average. Students with the highest and the lowest grades fall on either side.

Some instructors will only grade assignments and tests on a curve if it is clear that the entire class struggled with the exam. Others use the bell curve to grade for the duration of the term, combining every score and putting the whole class (or all of their classes, if they have more than one) on a curve once the raw scores are tallied.

How to make your grading techniques easier

Grading is a time-consuming exercise for most educators. Here are some tips to help you become more efficient and to lighten your load.

• Schedule time for grading: Pay attention to your rhythms and create a grading schedule that works for you. Break the work down into chunks and eliminate distractions so you can stay focused.
• Don’t assign ‘busy work’: Each student assignment should map clearly to an important learning outcome. Planning up front ensures each assignment is meaningful and will avoid adding too much to your plate.
• Use rubrics to your advantage: Clear grading criteria for student assignments will help reduce the cognitive load and second guessing that can happen when these tools aren’t in place. Having clear standards for different levels of performance will also help ensure fairness.
• Prioritize feedback: It’s not always necessary to provide feedback on every assignment. Also consider bucketing feedback into what was done well, areas for improvement and ways to improve. Clear, pointed feedback is less time-consuming to provide and often more helpful to students. 
• Reward yourself: Grading is taxing work. Be realistic about how much you can do and in what time period. Stick to your plan and make sure to reward yourself with breaks, a walk outside or anything else that will help you refresh. 

How Top Hat streamlines grading

There are many tools available to college educators to make grading student work more consistent and efficient. Top Hat’s all-in-one teaching platform allows you to automate a number of grading processes, including tests and quizzes using a variety of different question types. Attendance, participation, assignments and tests are all automatically captured in the Top Hat Gradebook , a sophisticated data management tool that maintains multiple student records.

In the Top Hat Gradebook, you can access individual and aggregate grades at a glance while taking advantage of many different reporting options. You can also sync grades and other reporting directly to your learning management system (LMS). 

Grading is one of the most essential components of the teaching and learning experience. It requires a great deal of strategy and thought to be executed well. While it certainly isn’t without its fair share of challenges, clear expectations and transparent practice ensure that students feel included as part of the process and can benefit from the feedback they receive. This way, they are able to track their own progress towards learning goals and course objectives.

Click here to learn more about Gradebook, Top Hat’s all-in-one solution designed to help you monitor student progress with immediate, real-time feedback.

Recommended Readings

The Ultimate Guide to Metacognition for Post-Secondary Courses

25 Effective Instructional Strategies For Educators

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6 Tips for Making the Most of Math Homework

Is homework effective? Educators seem to be evenly split on this question. Some insist that homework is essential because students need to review and practice skills at home. Others argue that it’s a waste of time and a burden on families, especially when some parents are not willing or able to help with homework. Even worse, some parents who genuinely want to help may teach the skill incorrectly, causing you to have to reteach it the next day.

Personally, I feel that homework can be very effective, especially in math, if you keep these tips in mind:

• Before assigning homework, make sure the majority of your students are at least somewhat proficient with the skill so they can experience success at home.
• Keep homework assignments short and to the point. Why assign 30 problems if all they need is 5?
• Only assign homework to those who need it. If a student has mastered a skill with 100% accuracy, why should he or she have to do the homework? Use the Quick Check formative assessment strategy described below to find out who needs additional practice and who doesn’t.
• Only assign homework to those who will benefit from it. If they don’t have a clue about how to complete the problems, homework on that skill is a waste of time. Furthermore, the resulting feelings of frustration can negatively impact the way students feel about math. Instead, differentiate the assignment by giving those students something easier or deferring the assignment until after they receive more help at school.
• Consider the level of parent support and your students’ home environments. If the majority of them will not be able to get help at home, and are more worried about where their next meal is coming from than the day’s assignment, you may want to greatly reduce the homework load.
• Rather than collecting homework and grading it, simply check off whether or not the student attempted ALL problems. Start each class period with a review and discussion of the previous day’s work. Expect students to be able to explain HOW they solved their problems, and don’t give them credit for the work if they can’t explain it.

Quick Check Formative Assessments

• Post four or five problems on a flip chart or on the board.
• Ask students to work the problems out on paper and transfer their answers to a dry erase board. If they are seated close together, have them put up barriers like notebooks or folders for privacy.
• Tell your students that they will have only ONE chance to show you their boards and try to earn their way out of the homework assignment. If they make even one careless error, they will have to complete the homework! Stick to your guns on this one!
• Ask students flip their dry erase boards face down when they are ready for you to check answers.
• Walk around the room with a checklist, and quickly peek at each board. Write the score on the student’s board and record it on your student checklist. Keep this list so you can refer to it the next day when checking off homework.
• Give your students a reasonable amount of time for the work, but there’s no need to wait until all children finish. If it takes them a long time, they need more practice at home.
• After most students are finished, review the assignment and discuss each problem so students understand the ones they missed.
• Post the homework assignment, and be sure the students who scored 100% know they are excused from doing the work.

Quick Check Benefits

More bright ideas for teachers.

• Growth Mindset
• Literature Circles
• Cooperative Learning

When Math Happens

Standards-based grading.

The following links are a snapshot of how Standards-Based Grading works in my classroom.

Free Online Workshop

• Link to Workshop

Vision / Summary

• Introduction & Vision
• SBG Summary: A Year in Review

Detailed Breakdowns

• Creating Concept Checklists
• Creating Quizzes
• Grading Quizzes
• What Does the Gradebook Look Like?
• Retake Policy
• Student Learning Folders
• Using Formative Assessment
• Unpacking Quizzes
• Growth Wall
• Concept Checklists
• Concept Quizzes
• Grade Sheet Template
• Quiz & Retake Analysis Handouts
• Frequently Asked Questions

Below are resources that are helpful for exploring, implementing, and creating a vision for Standards-Based Grading.

• The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource (Dan Meyer)
• 7 Reasons for Standards-Based Grading (Patricia L. Scriffiny)
• Improving the Way We Grade Science (Clymer & Wiliam)
• The Spirit of SBG (Frank Noschese)
• Standards-Based Grading (Shawn Cornally)
• Standards-Based Grading Implementation (Jason Buell)
• How Deprogramming Kids From How To Do School Could Improve Learning (Katrina Schwartz)
• My Assessment System (Dylan Kane)
• The Emotional Weight of Being Graded (Linda Flanagan)
• Math Class Doesn’t Work. Here’s the Solution (Jo Boaler)
• Standards-Based Grading: Bridging the Gap (Evan Weinberg)
• On Retakes (Dylan Kane)
• Effort vs. Luck (Kelly O’Shea)
• Best Practices for Standards-Based-Grading (Hanover Research)

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26 thoughts on “ Standards-Based Grading ”

THANK YOU for putting together such a thoughtful and thorough SBG system. I have been researching on this and your system (especially the autocrat tutorial!) has me sold on switching to SBG next year. There have been murmurs in my district about implementing SBG but there hasn’t been any support. Your site provides great resources and I’ll definitely bring it back to my district.

Thanks again.

Hey thank you so much for the kind words! I really appreciate it. Just a collection of stuff I’ve found from great resources around the web. Good luck with the switch, and feel free to email me any questions at any time.

This was a great resource for me when I transferred my grading system to standards based grading. Thanks!

Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate it. I’m glad it was helpful, and I’d like to hear if you have feedback for improvement. Thanks again!

This is an incredible blog. I love SBG and am so happy to see your organized system that is so thoughtful. I want to use AutoCrat!!!!!

Thank you so much for the positive feedback, Megan! I really appreciate it. Let me know if you have ideas for improvement. I really like autoCrat! Great tool.

I am gearing up to make the switch to SBG with my gifted 6th and 7th grade math. Thanks for all of the great resources. Question: When do students retake quizzes? At the end of class? Before/After school? On specified days? Also, do quizzes become increasingly more difficult? (I thought I read that somewhere…) I am a little overwhelmed with the logistics.

Thank you for the kind words! I’m excited that you’re making the switch. Students retake quizzes before/after school or during lunch. However, I’ve found it’s most helpful to put old concepts in new quizzes in order to have a “built-in” retake. So, if I taught solving equations earlier in the grading period but am now quizzing over a new concept, I’ll have questions about the new concept with one or two solving equations questions mixed in. This really helps the students who either can’t come in during non-school hours or who aren’t confident enough to come see a teacher (very intimidating for some kids).

Also, I usually keep my quizzes at the same difficulty level in order to help kids show progress, but I have no problem with the difficulty level increasing. I think that may be a good idea for a student who is trying to retake to get a grade from 90 to 100. A good challenge is helpful for that student. For my less confident, more struggling students, I like to keep the same difficulty level in order to not crush their spirit.

As for logistics, I like to just make a digital copy of my original quizzes and then change the numbers from there. This helps save time.

I am beyond thankful for your thoughtfulness, profound insights, and the ways you clearly value the dignity of children throughout all your systems. I’ve been doing SBG for the past couple years and yours is the most comprehensive resource I’ve come across. Just so you know, I’ve been giving presentations/PDs regularly and am directing folks in droves to your site. Hope that’s okay!

That being said, I have a question about your “Grading System” google doc. How does the “70% Concept Quizzes, 30% Daily” part work out? What constitutes the Daily portion? Is that part still about content mastery, or is it more about class participation? I’ve had my grade book set up where their grade is 100% decided upon based on their content mastery, and I’ve been wrestling over whether to include any type of class participation…

Your thoughts are much appreciated!

Wow! Thank you so much for the incredibly kind words! It means so much, and I really appreciate it. I’m glad the site has been useful, and you are always welcome to share or use anything here. I’ve relied heavily on so many other blogs (especially the ones linked on this page) and want to continue in their footsteps with sharing.

As for the 70-30 system, I stole it from Niles New Tech and started using it at the beginning of my journey through SBG. The 30% Daily pretty much just comes down to work ethic and teamwork. I give a weekly daily grade on Fridays based on the effort and teamwork I saw from each student during the week. I rate them similarly to how I rate their quizzes.

I also wrestle with how much percentage to put in this category though because I ultimately want the system to be based on content mastery. I’m intrigued by going 100% like you are. The only things that are keeping me in the 70-30 category are (1) remaining in compliance with district rules and (2) I like to reward the kids who are working hard but not necessarily performing highly on their quizzes. In addition, the daily percentage helps differentiate the kid who works super hard to make an A versus the kid who isn’t a hard worker but naturally talented. I’d like to reward the effort over the natural talent without effort.

Let me know if that helps. Thanks so much again for the kind words and questions!

Thanks for your response, Dane.

So when you’re giving them that weekly daily grade, do you do it publicly? Or do you just post the grade online/in your gradebook and hope the student checks it? I love the idea of giving them that feedback on their teamwork and effort every Friday, but I’d be frustrated if that feedback is going unnoticed by the students and just getting plugged into my gradebook. I guess my question here applies to all the grades you give out…you don’t actually write grades on student work when you pass it back, correct? How does that work logistically and how do students respond?

Sheesh, sorry for the multi-layered question, but I also have one more on this idea: When you say “district compliance”, do you mean ed. code and the requirement to have one grade entered per week?

Haha I really enjoy the questions! Keep them coming.

I do not give the weekly daily grade publicly. I do just post it in the online gradebook for the kids to see (my students are pretty good at checking frequently so they see it). However, now that you’ve mentioned it, I like the idea of having a little mini-conference with each kid to discuss why I gave them the daily grade I did. This could lead to a better relationship as well as better character development. I need to start trying that. Thanks for the idea!

I still like not writing grades on papers though. This has really helped with kids comparing each others’ grades and making hurtful comments to other kids. Also, one thing I make sure to do is not post a grade where they can see it (online gradebook) until after we have gone over the quiz/work together. I read a good book by Dylan Wiliam that said research has found that kids totally ignore feedback once they see a grade. The students get a little frustrated with not seeing grades immediately, but over time, after I continue to reinforce why I don’t put them on there, they get over it and actually like it. I’ve received notes from former students that said they like how the class was set up to make everyone feel equal and not get people called out. But again, I like your idea of doing some kind of individual debrief to better reinforce progress and relationship building.

As for district compliance, yes, I meant the requirement to put in one grade per week. Also, my district requires every teacher to use a certain percentage breakdown for major grades and daily grades. We are not allowed to do a full 100% for any category.

The book looks awesome…I started reading what I could from the preview on Amazon.

I like the idea of a mini-conference too. I’m thinking of trying to get to each kid once a grading period (5 weeks).

I have another question now: How do you do your letter grades? Is it just a straight average with standard cutoffs (e.g. A = 90-100, B=80-89, etc.)?

Because my class is 100% content, I’ve been trying some sort of balance between average of scores (1-4) + minimum score on any concept (e.g. a B means you have a 3.2+ average, and your lowest score on any standard is a 2). I’m curious, though, how you set up the letter grades because I’m having trouble getting kids away from their comfort of the letter-grade label. At the same time, I would like students to understand the grading system as well as possible, given the fact that so often students feel like grades are something that’s done TO them rather than something they have control over.

My letter grades are just a straight average with standard cutoffs. A = 90-100, B = 80-89, C = 70-79, and F = 69 and below. My SBG scale goes from 5-10 partly because it’s easy to make it fit the 50-100 scale.

The way I’ve tried to de-emphasize grade mindsets with the kids is to reinforce often with words and actions that I’m not too concerned about grades but instead focusing on how we can improve. One way I try to do this is by putting this image in front of them before every formal quiz.

My words alone don’t get the job done though. I have to back it up with my practices. Not putting grades on papers has helped. Also, I make sure not to put a grade in the online gradebook they can access until we have gone over the quiz as a class. This encourages them to analyze their work and also prevents kids from peeking.

One thing that has really helped is to give ungraded quizzes somewhat often. I saw a bunch of kids have “aha” moments when I first did this. One day, I decided to just have them try some quiz type problems and told them that I won’t grade it but will only look at their work to see common mistakes and thought processes in order to help us get better. One kid even said out loud, “it’s because he just wants to see what we know.” It was a big moment of trust building and confirmation for that class and me. So, I highly recommend providing opportunities for kids to be given chances to show what they know with no grade attached. This really helps emphasize that grades aren’t the biggest concern but learning and improvement is. It doesn’t connect with everyone, but I think it helps a lot of kids.

Different strategies work with different kids, and it takes a while to reinforce and build trust. I feel like I have to repeat my intentions often, but over time, most of the kids seem to buy in. The aha moment above didn’t happen until second semester of the school year we were in. So, it can take a while for sure.

Dane, I want to thank you for the information you have put here. I have been mulling over a switch the SBG in my classroom for a while. I teach 7th grade Math and Algebra 1. It seems to fit extremely well in the Math classroom.

I have a few questions for you. What does a normal class period look like in your room? How long do the quizzes take? I think I read that you don’t give quizzes on every concept, but I’m assuming that there are times that quizzes are given over more than one concept?

My Algebra class is currently running on the Flipped Classroom template. The students watch a video created by me about the topic they will be working for the next class period. They asked questions at the end of the video, while it is fresh in their mind (using a website called Edpuzzle). We address those questions at the beginning of class, and then students spend a majority of class working through problems on that topic. At the end of the class, they are quizzed on that specific thing. At this point, I only have 2 questions on the quiz. However, I am realizing that if I move to SBG then I will need to up the number of questions on the quiz if there is more than one standard covered in a section. What are your thoughts on how SBG would fit into a Flipped Classroom situation?

Thanks again for the website, and the great resources. I will be pointing these things out to my principal for her review.

Hey Allen! Thank you for the kind words!

A normal class period is pretty traditional in my room. I try to get the kids interested with some kind of hook, estimation, or intriguing situation, and then I direct teach a lot of the time. I try to give as many group/partner opportunities as I can as well.

As for the quizzes, it depends on the class. Some classes take the whole 50 minute period to finish, and others probably take half the class. I usually have just 4 questions on the actual quiz, and then I provide an optional challenge for the kids who want to prove that they deserve a 100 without having to retake.

For most quizzes, there are multiple concepts assessed. This helps with the possibility of quizzing too often, and it also allows me to bring back concepts we have already covered in order to re-assess progress and basically provide a built-in retake. This saves a lot of time and also gives kids an opportunity to show progress without having to come in before or after school (as we know, this isn’t always possible for many kids due to circumstances outside of their control).

That’s a really cool setup you have! I think SBG can definitely fit because like you said, if fits really well in the math classroom. One thing I wish I knew when I first starting using SBG is to not feel pressure to quiz too frequently. I read a quote later on that said not to grade kids on something until learning has occurred. This was huge for me, and now I try to give as many days as possible for the kids to process through what we’re learning before giving a quiz. This has been helpful with morale and performance because if I quiz before they’re ready, many will get discouraged and be tempted to check out.

Overall, it’s definitely a feeling out process when making the switch, but the kids like it and respond well. They can see good intentions, and it’s also okay to let them know why you’re changing. They definitely like the why behind SBG.

Thanks again for the positive feedback! Let me know if you have other questions at any time.

Dane, Somehow, someway, my math department is taking on SBG in a very similar way to your approach. I think that we all tend to end up with very similar “best practices” since students everywhere react similarly to certain practices. Originally we required students to do a specific set of homework problems in order to earn retakes of assessments, but we found that the students who never did their homework were most likely to need those retakes. So we decided that we needed to allow everyone multiple opportunities and that they needed to be built into future assessments. Then, we had to battle the need for students to retain information. If we allowed for students to get the highest grade possible on the first assessment, then they could opt to never be assessed on it again. Our precalculus team decided to level their questions, so the first assessment only has basic level questions and if a student gets that completely correct they have only earned an 80% on that concept (we call them long-term learning targets). The second assessment has basic and medium level so students can choose to answer the basic again or try the medium. If they get a medium level question completely correct they earn a 90% on that concept. The third and last assessment contains basic, medium, and advanced level questions and the only way to earn a 100% on a concept is to get an advanced level question completely correct. Students only earn one score per concepts, the higher score prevails. We also use rubrics to assess in most courses and are going that direction for all courses within the next year. Other courses have not become this sophisticated and they offer two or three built in opportunities per concept and students have to either remain the same or increase their score to keep the highest score. If their performance decreases then their scores are averaged. As I said, we are definitely fighting the battle of retention and making sure that students learning something well over time not just for tomorrow’s assessment. We also make sure to have all of our classwork and homework resources posted online and aligned to the concepts that will be assessed so that students can go back to areas of weakness and practice more. Our next level of work in precalc is to make sure students know what we mean by basic, medium, and advanced level problems. This is an informal conversation in class and sometimes after we do a problem students are surprised that I consider it a basic level. We have found that the transparency of this system and clear communication can either be the key to making it work or its total demise. However, students are definitely thinking more about their strengths/weaknesses than their overall course grade. They are able to ask specific questions instead of saying that the whole unit is confusing. Students who tend to have been low achievers usually have at least one concept that they shine on per assessment instead of seeing an overall failing grade on their paper. The advantages of this system definitely outshine those of our previous point-based, quiz-test-quiz-test system. We have increased the rigor of our curriculum and students are learning a lot about math and about learning! All the best in your endeavors!

Wow! Thank you for the detailed breakdown of what y’all are doing. I love it! Great to hear that we’re on the same page.

As for retention, I’ve been trying to do as many spiraling handouts as possible to try to keep the kids fresh with concepts. I have a really good crop of kids, so most of them aren’t giving up after mastering concepts. I also don’t give homework, so I think that’s helped them stay motivated to do in-class assignments since they don’t have to do anything at home.

Thanks for making another great case for SBG! I’m really happy to hear that it’s going well. Keep up the awesome work!

I am so happy to have found your blog. You have answered some big questions for me as I moved towards piloting SBG in my classroom this year, and especially helped me envision what this whole process might look like. I appreciate the work you put into this blog, thank you.

I do have a question: for each assessment on a concept (Say the first quiz opportunity, and then later a test) how are you recording these in the grade book? In my mind each concept would have two entries (Midpoint: quiz, Midpoint: Test …or something.) I understand your policy that a quiz re-take can potentially replace the previous quiz grade in the grade book. My question is: Is this what the test result on a concept does? It seems that after each testing opportunity, you update the grade book for that one concept entry whether it was a test/quiz etc. Am I thinking about this correctly?

one more thing 🙂

You mentioned that your students record and update scores in their own copy of the concept check sheet. Can you expand on the role this plays in your classroom with your students?

Check out this post from today and let me know if it answers your question. Thanks again!

Thank you for the kind words! I’m glad the resources have been helpful. Great questions as well!

In my version of SBG, I only give quizzes for the concepts. Those are the major assessment grades. The only tests I give are once a grading period district tests. These are cumulative exams that are required for every teacher in our district to give.

So, in the gradebook’s major grade columns, I have one major grade for each concept on the concept list. One grade for Midpoint, one for Angle Pairs, and so on. I don’t have a midpoint quiz and a midpoint test. Here’s more about what it looks like in the gradebook.

For retakes, we just retake the quizzes for an opportunity to replace those quiz grades. Also, the district tests that I mentioned are only allowed to be retaken for up to a 70.

Let me know if that helps!

Just wanted to say I absolutely love what you have done here! I would love to try out what you have done for Geometry this year and implement this into my classroom. I look forward to seeing what you do with the Algebra concepts, as it looks like it is a hard work in-progress! I do teach Algebra and Geometry to 9th graders (Geometry students being 1 year advanced).

Couple questions….What textbook does your district use? We use Big Ideas and it seems as though our “Essential Standards” that we want kids to get are spot on with what you have.

Also, as far as your quarterly tests….are those made by you or given by the district? You mentioned they are multiple choice. Just wondering what those look like. Thanks for all you do! Must’ve taken a ton of time and thank you for sharing!!

Thanks so much for the kind words! I really appreciate it. Feel free to take whatever you like! After reflecting on the Algebra 1 curriculum, I realized I went too fast, so it’ll be edited throughout this school year.

We use Big Ideas as well, so I’m glad it’s matching what you have!

The quarterly tests are made by the district and are all multiple choice. Usually it’s questions taken from our released state exams. I think they also pull from our textbook and PSAT practice tests. Pretty much just a normal comprehensive exam over everything that was learned during the nine week grading period.

Thanks again for the encouragement! Hope you have a great year!

Hi I am a first year teacher and I have always wanted to implement SBG and Mastery since I assisted at a school that did this. Being new I had 0 resources and your info is a GAME CHANGER.

I have a question, our grading policies are 50/50 for minor and major grades. To put more into the minor category what would you recommend to put in there? We do interactive notebooks as well so I was leaning towards notebook checks? I teach 7th grade so organization is a HUGE goal.

Also, if I am reading this correctly “homework” ceases to exist?

Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate it and am glad the site has been helpful.

Good question about minor and major grades. I’ve found that having minor grades weighted to more than 30% can over-influence grades in either the positive or negative direction. So, when I’ve been in places that require more than 30%, I’ve taken quiz averages and used them as minor grades as well. This may or may not be against the rules in your district, so you’ll want to double check.

I’m also intrigued by lagging assignments . If I have to take a grade over something other than quizzes, I at least want it to be over something that students have had time to learn. I really prefer not to grade students over material they’re still learning unless it’s a completion grade or something not dependent on right or wrong answers.

Also, to answer your question about homework, you’re correct. I decided not to give homework after trying it early on in my career. I found that it inevitably put obstacles in the way of a certain percentage of students, and many of their grades were not reflective of their learning because of it. I know many people use homework in a really helpful way though, so I don’t want to discourage it if you find a method that works for you.

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Center for Teaching

Grading student work.

Print Version

What Purposes Do Grades Serve?

Developing grading criteria, making grading more efficient, providing meaningful feedback to students.

• Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-Sectioned Courses

Minimizing Student Complaints about Grading

Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson identify the multiple roles that grades serve:

• as an  evaluation of student work;
• as a  means of communicating to students, parents, graduate schools, professional schools, and future employers about a student’s  performance in college and potential for further success;
• as a  source of motivation to students for continued learning and improvement;
• as a  means of organizing a lesson, a unit, or a semester in that grades mark transitions in a course and bring closure to it.

Additionally, grading provides students with feedback on their own learning , clarifying for them what they understand, what they don’t understand, and where they can improve. Grading also provides feedback to instructors on their students’ learning , information that can inform future teaching decisions.

Why is grading often a challenge? Because grades are used as evaluations of student work, it’s important that grades accurately reflect the quality of student work and that student work is graded fairly. Grading with accuracy and fairness can take a lot of time, which is often in short supply for college instructors. Students who aren’t satisfied with their grades can sometimes protest their grades in ways that cause headaches for instructors. Also, some instructors find that their students’ focus or even their own focus on assigning numbers to student work gets in the way of promoting actual learning.

Given all that grades do and represent, it’s no surprise that they are a source of anxiety for students and that grading is often a stressful process for instructors.

Incorporating the strategies below will not eliminate the stress of grading for instructors, but it will decrease that stress and make the process of grading seem less arbitrary — to instructors and students alike.

Source: Walvoord, B. & V. Anderson (1998).  Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.

• Consider the different kinds of work you’ll ask students to do for your course.  This work might include: quizzes, examinations, lab reports, essays, class participation, and oral presentations.
• For the work that’s most significant to you and/or will carry the most weight, identify what’s most important to you.  Is it clarity? Creativity? Rigor? Thoroughness? Precision? Demonstration of knowledge? Critical inquiry?
• Transform the characteristics you’ve identified into grading criteria for the work most significant to you, distinguishing excellent work (A-level) from very good (B-level), fair to good (C-level), poor (D-level), and unacceptable work.

Developing criteria may seem like a lot of work, but having clear criteria can

• save time in the grading process
• make that process more consistent and fair
• communicate your expectations to students
• help you to decide what and how to teach
• help students understand how their work is graded

Sample criteria are available via the following link.

• Analytic Rubrics from the CFT’s September 2010 Virtual Brownbag
• Create assignments that have clear goals and criteria for assessment.  The better students understand what you’re asking them to do the more likely they’ll do it!
• letter grades with pluses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.)
• 100-point numerical scale (for exams, certain types of projects, etc.)
• check +, check, check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.)
• pass-fail or credit-no-credit (for preparatory work)
• Limit your comments or notations to those your students can use for further learning or improvement.
• Spend more time on guiding students in the process of doing work than on grading it.
• For each significant assignment, establish a grading schedule and stick to it.

Light Grading – Bear in mind that not every piece of student work may need your full attention. Sometimes it’s sufficient to grade student work on a simplified scale (minus / check / check-plus or even zero points / one point) to motivate them to engage in the work you want them to do. In particular, if you have students do some small assignment before class, you might not need to give them much feedback on that assignment if you’re going to discuss it in class.

Multiple-Choice Questions – These are easy to grade but can be challenging to write. Look for common student misconceptions and misunderstandings you can use to construct answer choices for your multiple-choice questions, perhaps by looking for patterns in student responses to past open-ended questions. And while multiple-choice questions are great for assessing recall of factual information, they can also work well to assess conceptual understanding and applications.

Test Corrections – Giving students points back for test corrections motivates them to learn from their mistakes, which can be critical in a course in which the material on one test is important for understanding material later in the term. Moreover, test corrections can actually save time grading, since grading the test the first time requires less feedback to students and grading the corrections often goes quickly because the student responses are mostly correct.

Spreadsheets – Many instructors use spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) to keep track of student grades. A spreadsheet program can automate most or all of the calculations you might need to perform to compute student grades. A grading spreadsheet can also reveal informative patterns in student grades. To learn a few tips and tricks for using Excel as a gradebook take a look at this sample Excel gradebook .

• Use your comments to teach rather than to justify your grade, focusing on what you’d most like students to address in future work.
• Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an assignment.
• Comment primarily on patterns — representative strengths and weaknesses.
• Avoid over-commenting or “picking apart” students’ work.
• In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students rather than provide answers for them.

Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-sectioned Courses (for course heads)

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to teaching assistants, graders, and students in your course.
• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your teaching assistants and graders.
• Encourage teaching assistants and graders to share grading concerns and questions with you.
• have teaching assistants grade assignments for students not in their section or lab to curb favoritism (N.B. this strategy puts the emphasis on the evaluative, rather than the teaching, function of grading);
• have each section of an exam graded by only one teaching assistant or grader to ensure consistency across the board;
• have teaching assistants and graders grade student work at the same time in the same place so they can compare their grades on certain sections and arrive at consensus.
• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus.
• Avoid modifying your policies, including those on late work, once you’ve communicated them to students.
• Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.
• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focusing rather on course learning goals.

For a comprehensive look at grading, see the chapter “Grading Practices” from Barbara Gross Davis’s  Tools for Teaching.

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• My name is Rebecca, and I know that many high school math teachers struggle to find the time to create engaging lessons and resources appropriate for their students' levels.
• I've been teaching for 25+ years, and I know that struggle well! My resources will alleviate that overwhelming feeling while giving you the tools to feel confident and empowered in your teaching so that you can focus on inspiring your students.

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Latest on the blog

• Should You Grade Homework in Your Math Class?

First and foremost, in this blog post, I am considering only the grading policy - not assigning homework. Homework should be assigned often, whether it is graded or not.  I also recognize that the word “homework” has some negative connotations, and as a result, some teachers use other terms such as “practice, ” "independent work," or “check your understanding,” as popularized by Peter Liljedahl’s book Building Thinking Classrooms .

Have you ever asked yourself these questions:

• Should I grade homework?
• If I don't grade homework, what will motivate students to practice the skills taught?
• If I do grade homework, how do I prevent students from cheating?
• If I don’t grade homework, will the students’ grades be lower due to fewer grades in the gradebook?
• If I do grade homework, how much should it weigh?
• If I do grade homework, should I check it for accuracy or completion?

These are questions that every teacher has asked themselves.  Grading homework is the bane of most math teachers' existence. I have been a teacher for over two decades, and in that time, I have tried several ways to deal with homework:

• don’t grade it
• collect it and grade it twice a month
• check it every day
• grade it whenever I feel like it

Each policy I have tried has its advantages and disadvantages.

In this post, I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of grading homework and give some ideas on handling homework in your math classes.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Let's consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of grading homework and of NOT grading homework.

Decades ago, before people carried tiny computers in their pockets, teachers assigned and graded homework. It was expected that students would do their homework, and teachers could always claim the students’ grades would suffer if they didn’t do their homework.  That worked for some students, but not all. 

Some other issues to consider

A motivated student who needs help understanding the material may do an entire homework assignment incorrectly and learn the material wrong. 

Teachers often want students to check their answers when doing homework, so they assign odd problems whose answers are typically in the back of the book. Some students will take advantage of the answers being provided and simply copy the answers just to get a grade.

Some teachers intentionally do not provide answers to homework problems to prevent students from copying the answer key; this is an issue for honest and motivated students who cannot determine if they are successful on the homework.

With today's technology, it is easy for students to find the answers to their homework; think websites like Slader.com (now part of Quizlet) and symbolab.com and smartphone apps like PhotoMath and Mathway.

As a teacher, it can feel like a constant battle to motivate students to do math outside of class and to prevent them from cheating.

There is no perfect homework policy that will satisfy everyone’s needs. You, as the teacher, must consider several factors when establishing your homework policy:

• Does the district/school have a homework policy?
• Is your class remedial, honors, Advanced Placement, or dual credit?
• What is the culture of the students at your school? Are the students high achieving? Is it a Title I school?
• What is the culture of the teachers in the department? Is there a department policy regarding homework?

Some possible solutions

If you must grade homework, it’s best if it weighs only 5% in the gradebook.  This means that students are still incentivized to do the homework, and parents understand that homework affects the student’s grade. Still, if a student does zero homework in your class and does well on all assessments, he will not fail the class – nor will he earn a perfect score.

If you must make homework weigh 10% or more, then another way to look at homework is as a curve. Suppose you never curve your test grades and do not offer test corrections or retakes , but you grade homework for completion. In that case, having a 100% homework average will somewhat offset any low assessment averages.

If you are not planning to grade homework, finding other ways to check students’ understanding is important. Some ideas:

• Offer retakes or corrections on major assessments. Since many students won’t do homework if it’s not graded, you give them a chance to correct their errors by offering retakes or corrections.  You can put conditions on your retakes or corrections, such as students can only retake three times per semester, or the corrections allow the student to earn back half of the points they missed.
• Give students “homework checks” where at the end of X days, students copy down 5 problems from the previous week’s homework assignments. (this could be graded for completion or for accuracy).
• Give students a “homework quiz” where every day (or most days), the students must answer 3-5 questions similar to the previous night’s homework; students may use their homework to help them answer the questions. (Best to do this *after* you've gone over questions from the previous night's homework.) This is graded for accuracy.  I did this successfully for a few years when I taught at a school with 90-minute blocks.

Check out my blog post for other formative assessment ideas: 

https://www.hoffmath.com/2021/10/formative.html

What teachers are saying

I asked the members of my Facebook group to give me their thoughts on grading homework. Here are some of the responses:

“I try to formatively assess them in class as much as possible because I can’t rely solely on how they did on homework since many students use the apps (photomath, symbolab, etc.) to complete their homework.” - Lupha

“Photomath does it for them. I don’t count any work for accuracy that isn’t done in front of me.” – Fran

“I don’t personally believe there is a benefit to required homework in non-honors/AP/Dual Credit courses.” - Felicia

“I think assigning grades to the learning process is inefficient. It brings grades down because they will make mistakes. It is not an accurate assessment of overall learning. It is mainly used to put emphasis on getting the work done.” Joseph D

“I have started assigning as much digital homework as I can. I like escape rooms because they have to enter the answer. They can still cheat, but it’s harder. If I don’t give some kind of grade, they won’t do it.” - Denise

“I grade for accuracy with a mix of digital assignments (self-graded) and hard copy. I find that if I grade for accuracy, students will give a little more effort, which helps me have a good idea of where they are. I always give 2 days to complete an assignment (which cuts down on copying) and leave some time at the end of each class for students to work or ask questions. I also allow for a few errors to still receive full credit.” Vickie G

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether a high school math teacher should grade homework. It ultimately depends on the individual teacher's teaching philosophy and goals. Some may grade homework to provide students with regular feedback and more grades in the gradebook, while others may choose not to grade homework to save time and find more creative ways to assess student understanding.

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MS Sunday Funday – Grading (or not grading) Homework…? That is the question!

I am still working this out.  I need help from others to continue to gain perspective.  My hope is by the fall of 2013 I will have a solid homework system in place.  Right now, I am still bobbling around, seeking opinions and research, all specifically with mathematics content in mind… because I believe when it comes to grading (or not grading) homework, the content area, specifically with respect to mathematics, can’t be ignored.

I started some dialogue several months ago here , and really enjoy reading different ideas from other math teachers in the trenches.  Some of us seem solid in our systems, not questioning whether homework is assessing learning of content or behaviors .  Yet, I wrestle with not only *how* to “grade” homework, but whether “grading” homework in math is even fair at all.  So, here are my “before and current” homework grading procedures.  I’ll follow up with  “potential future” methods I’m tossing around.

“Before & Current”

Up to this point, I have graded homework primarily based on completion.  There.  I said it.  And it goes a little somethin’ like this:

3 points: Student legitimately tried every problem, with evidence of work, even if there are errors (This is the first chance to practice a new skill or concept, after all… are we expecting perfection at this point?  This is part of the reason I think “grading” homework in math seems inappropriate).

2 points: More than half but not all problems legitimately attempted

1 point: Less than half of all problems legitimately attempted

0 points: Homework not done or not present at due date/time

To encourage math communication, students get into a “homework huddle” at the start of each class (small groups or pairs of students comparing and discussing homework answers, seeking resolutions for discrepancies).  While students “huddle” I take a lap around the classroom, glance at student work and listen in on dialogue, recording scores as mentioned above.  We come together as a class, I either ask for answers verbally, display the answer key, or use a tool like Socrative or Nearpod to spot-check specific problems.  Generally, questions are minimal after a “huddle” since students help one another talk through and correct errors or misconceptions.  This process helps me know if I need to do a little reteaching before moving forward as well.  To put the homework “grades” in perspective, my current district chooses to weight homework as only 10% of students’ average… which tells me, whether I choose to “grade” it or not, it’s not worth very much.  At only 10% we don’t seem to value homework as a “grade”, do we?

So why “grade” it at all?  (Am I being devil’s advocate, or posing a legitimate question?)

“Potential Future”

A feasible method to “grade” homework in such a way that scores reflect learning of math content , not behaviors , could be as follows:

* Assign daily homework, as in the past.

* Facilitate a daily “homework huddle,” spot-check work, and listen to conversations.

* Display answer key, or use an app to do a quick check of specific problems.

(So far, nothing in the plan has changed… wait for it…)

* Don’t assign a homework score for each and every assignment.  Rather, give a weekly homework “quiz”, perhaps every Friday.  Problems on this quiz would be inspired by homework problems, but wouldn’t be the exact same problems.  Allow students to use the homework they completed throughout the week as a reference during the quiz (this would hopefully provide incentive to do it, now that actually recording a score for every assignment has been taken away).

* “Grade” the “homework quiz” knowing that students have been practicing on a daily basis, have communicated with one another about the concepts, and have had reteaching classroom opportunities.

Ultimately, if I opt for the “homework quiz” philosophy, I’d like to utilize an app to help with the actual grading or scoring.   Socrative could help, but because students can accidentally press the wrong answer choice, it’s not ideal for graded assessments in my experience (I REALLY REALLY hope they change this issue soon because I love their instant color-coded data reports so much!)  I am looking into The Answer Pad as an option, and Infuse Learning looks promising, though I prefer apps that don’t require the teacher to manually enter student/class info.

What are your thoughts?  Is the “Before & Current” plan acceptable?  Should we aspire to assess mathematics over behaviors and embrace a plan more like the “Potential Future”?

Please discuss, and thanks in advance for reading and for your input! 🙂

This post was also shared here.

25 Responses to MS Sunday Funday – Grading (or not grading) Homework…? That is the question!

Hi. Our school only allows us to give one 30-minute homework assignment per week (grade 7-9 in Sweden). We have to give students a full week to do the homework. That’s the school policy.

I have read a lot of research on the topic (my teaching credential thesis was on this issue), and, unfortunately, it is completely ambiguous as to the value of homework. All sides can find material to support their point of view in the very minimal research that has been done. What is there suggests an increasing benefit with age, and highest benefit on training basic skills (as opposed to any kind of deeper problem solving).

Personally, I don’t believe it is fair to grade homework. Not only that, but I believe it is counter-productive to grade it. In general, motivated students are the ones who will care the most about doing homework. But they also care a lot of about their grade, an that concern tends to override the interest in learning. From my experience this means that the more you grade homework, the more you will encourage students to cheat with it – in particular you may add the motivated students to the cheating crowd due to grade fears.

We don’t grade homework, and have stopped checking it. We decided there was no point, since if we checked it that just meant the ones who didn’t care would stand outside the classroom copying off their friend five minutes before class. It was a waste of their time and our time. We assign it, we go over it, answer questions about it, but leave it up to the parents and students to actually do it (which raises another issue of the fairness of grading homework with incredibly different home situations).

I really like your idea of a homework quiz. We have wanted to do something like that ourselves, but don’t have time. One of the problems with Sweden is we have the smallest number of classroom hours of math in all the OECD countries (3 hours a week at our school, and that is more than most schools)

Have you tried ThatQuiz? It works fine with iPads and I believe you can set it so that students can change their answers. It keep track on all grades for a class across multiple quizzes. You can even assign homework with it and automatically see who bothered to do it at a mere glance (assuming you are allowed to assign homework that requires the internet).

Anyway, just my thoughts on the issue.

By the way, thanks for the ThingLink tips. I have now created 3 of my own and have started to spread the idea to the science department at our school as well.

I ADORE thatquiz.org! Thanks for mentioning it! I have used the quick quizzes that the website generates, but haven’t created any of my own quizzes. Have you created your own quizzes for students? I love tracking student scores and the ability to see their incorrect answers right next to the correct ones. It really helps students see errors, especially if they’re making similar mistakes repeatedly.

Thanks so much for your insight, and check out this ThatQuiz ThingLink. – though it is specific for my classes, using a ThingLink as a “table of contents” if you will has helped students access their ThatQuiz classes quite easily.

Hi Cathy, I currently use the same 3-point system that you use for homework. One of the problems I have had is there are certain students who never do homework, but have excellent grades on everything they do in class. The zeros they continually get on homework assignments brings their marking period grade down, therefore not reflecting their true learning. I wrestle with this idea all the time. But I think I need to assign homework to teach students responsibility and to give them extra practice, that’s why I don’t grade for correctness, just effort. For now, I will continue this practice, but I look forward to reading some other teachers’ input to this topic for new ideas to try out next year. Caryn

It’s nice to read that others have followed a similar philosophy – thanks for sharing!

Last year our middle school department decided to go with no grading for homework. We jumped in and surprisingly I found that I liked the waters. There have been many positives, and I would not want to change back. If you continue to assign homework faithfully, most kids will keep doing it. Assigning problems with the answers is extremely helpful, because students start to see that the work helps them get better at math and use it as practice.

Providing answers – that is a great point. I have been known to do this using resources from websites like Kuta Software. Even when the answer key is occasionally incorrect, it sure sparks some great math dialogue!

I like the idea of the homework huddles and of the homework quiz.

Especially the homework quiz – the main benefit I see of that is that if they can use their homework as notes on the quiz, they will hopefully show more detail on their work.

Thanks for the ThingLink ThatQuiz idea – that was really cool. I’ll definitely have to do something like that soon. I have made a few of my own quizzes. Some are public. If you are curious search teachers for “Taub” and you will find the ones I made.

By the way, I’ve also started writing my own iPad apps. I don’t do fancy graphics, just a few basic training apps. I believe you called them “one offs” or something like that in an earlier post. Anyway, if you had a good idea for a simple focused training without fancy graphics send it my way and maybe I’ll use it for my next app. The two I’ve written so far are putting fractions on a number line and just basic multiplication practice (mostly to get used to how to write an app).

One thing with homework I forgot to mention is that I also give answers with my homework and let students correct themselves. This erases all motivation for cheating. I then give time the day it is due for questions about what they didn’t understand, although I find that most of them are able to figure it out from the answer if they get stuck.

Another point worth mentioning is grading “philosophy” here in Sweden and how that might differ from America. We are not allowed to use an average or anything like that for grades. We do what we call “positive grading” – we count successes for them but don’t count failures against them.

By our national rules, when we set a grade, the ONLY thing that matters is the knowledge/ability of the student at that exact moment when the final grade is set. This means in theory that they can do nothing all year, fail every quiz and test and then on the last day of school somehow show a complete understanding and thus get an A. Although that is impossible because of time concerns, the idea is guiding in our approach. So in the example given above about students who don’t do homework but show good understanding, it would be against the law here to count the homework issues “against” them.

It does take a lot of pressure off of tests – in fact we no longer have “tests” – we are supposed to assess EVERYTHING they do, and are required by law to use multiple forms of assessment. Some days we have what we call “individual work” which we say is like any other day of practice, but they are working on their own instead and we look more closely at their work to see what they know or are having trouble with. This replaces the old test idea. If there is something they don’t understand they can make it up in the future during other individual work days.

It is so interesting to read about and compare your school’s policies to ours here in the United States!

Your experiences with writing apps also sounds very interesting! One skill-based app idea off-hand that I would love to see is something that allows students to compare and order rational numbers. Have you seen the free Number Line app? While it’s a great little freebie, all the values are positive. Since I teach 8th graders, the focus is more on rational numbers, so throwing some negative values in there would really help them.

P.S. David, are you on Twitter by chance? Would love to follow you and stay in touch! I plan to look at your quizzes on ThatQuiz as well – thanks for sharing!

No, I’m not on Twitter – don’t really have time for it. Did you mean just putting negative fractions on a number line? Or did you mean actual calculations with positive and negative fractions?

Fractions are actually really annoying on the ipad – especially if a student has to enter one. It is hard to come up with an easy to implement method for it without a preset format (like always a mixed number, or always just a fraction, etc). One of the downside of computer support for math right now – really basic stuff can be really annoying to implement.

If you want to look at my free number line app to compare to the one you use (I didn’t know that one was around) you can search for my name on the app store as well.

By the way, we are using google drive at our school and I have started working a bit with google apps scripts as well. If you maintain a web page I could share some ideas/code that way as well. They work on ipads through a normal web browser.

I was also curious how you maintain the content on your ipads classwise? We are having some technical difficulties that way. The iPads work great individually, but our system for trying to push the same apps to all of them at once is not very stable. We also can’t control or check what the students are doing on the iPads which can be issue with some students playing games when they should be working. How do you handle this technical challenges?

My students have access to apps that have been purchased by our school district in a “self-service” area accessible from student iPads. They can also download apps at their leisure (versus your description of pushing apps to iPads all at once). Our students take their own iPads home every night, and are responsible for bringing them to school every day, fully charged.

I do my best to be mobile and vigilant as far as monitoring student activities. I also make it a practice for students to “double-home tap and close all the apps” before we begin an activity. Likewise, if we are not using the iPad for a learning activity, students are to close the iPads or put them away. I also try to be very purposeful with the tasks I choose. For example, students have no choice but to be on-task if they are using an app like Nearpod or Socrative that captures data in real time.

I am beginning a new school year where homework outside of school can not be counted. The students are also each getting new math books and a google chrome book. I really struggle with how to teach them concepts with out using homework to help. We have written and developed a new curriculum based on the Common Core and we need to rewrite assessments and if they don’t pass one of the standards, they have to retake the assessment over and over again. Needless to say, I am not sure how this will work for my students. I teach a lower level Pre Algebra and Algebra in high school. Many of my students are on I.E.P.s and struggle academically anyway. Any help would be appreciated on how to start the year. We can grade anything done in the classroom, but not outside the classroom.

It sounds like you have a unique year ahead! It also sounds like, though you can’t “grade” work done outside of class, you can still assign/encourage it, is that correct? Maybe a flipped classroom model may help students a bit? Or assigning work that won’t be graded, but will be discussed in class and will eventually be quizzed? I just read this post by the amazing Rafranz Davis this morning about how she handled homework – her circumstances were different, but maybe there are still some take-aways for you? http://www.rndesigns.com/blog/no-math-homework-just-bringbacks/

Hello, Just ran across your blog. I wanted to give you an idea. I don’t grade homework. I tell the students to expect a quiz everyday. Their grades are 50% quizzes, 50% exams. They can use notes on their quizzes and exams. I assign “practice problems”; they are odd problems, of which, the answers are in the b.o.b. I have more than 10 years teaching experience. I have used this model from 5th – 12th grade. Currently, I am teaching 5th – 8th grade. I did this b/c students were cheating. So my thought was create a system where they can’t cheat. Parents would even do their homework for them. Nice.

I love the idea! Perhaps we can move toward this model in future school years. In my district, homework is currently a required category in our electronic grade book. How many questions were on each daily “quiz”, how much class time did they take to administer, and how long are your class periods? Thanks!

We currently are under a very tight eight period day. Our class duration is 50 minutes. I am trying to sell the block scheduling concept to our school. I have taught in that realm, as well.

The quiz concept is however you want to factor it in. The only thing is that your opponent is time.

I would say on average 4 to 6 problems. Every now and then concepts may just be one simple step. Well, then I’ll give 10 problems. The more new or challenging a concept, the less quiz problems I’ll give.

You have to be able to read the students facial expressions when you are teaching. It’s a free “tell”. That way you can anticipate if they are going to have difficulty the next day or not.

Thank you for your encouragement.

I’d like to finally say that all I’m trying to do is find a system that helps students to do their best academically and be held accountable.

Interesting.

I’m also in a conundrum regarding student homework. Depending on the course is whether I grade it based on completeness or based on correctness. I teach in a rather small district (there is only one other math teach for 6-12). The other teacher does not grade homework. In middle school it’s not such an issue. However, the high school students confess to just not doing the work in the other teacher’s class. They don’t see any point in practicing the concepts if they won’t be graded on their practice. To high school students, time is a commodity (academics, sports, extra-curriculars, work, social, etc). I’ve had more than one (or 20) conversations with students who were happy to be back in my class because they felt the homework helped them learn better. When I asked why they just didn’t do the homework in their other math class, they said it was too hard to keep up if they knew it didn’t matter. In other words, internal motivation to learn is really hard to keep up without some sort of external motivation. For some students, grades are at least some sort of external motivator.

That said, I have 6 different preps and I feel I’m not teaching as well as I could because I spend so much time checking in student work. There must be a better way.

sorry to butt in here but I have been searching and searching for some kind of factual research that shows what the best way of grading homework. Specifically math homework. My daughter struggles with math and has been especially hard this year with a new middle school, changed curriculum (common core) and increased expectations (taking a lot from 6th and some 7th and pushing it down to require it in 5th). She squeeked by most tests but what brought her overall scores down to failing was the homework. This is how it was handled and I can’t stress how much I disagree with it. I’m looking for some evidence so that I can argue this practice for the following year. 1. All homework assignments were given a letter grade. 2. Homework assignments were weighted the same as any other quiz or test. 3. The students never had access to an answer key. 4. Students were not given the opportunity to try working the problems again. In my mind this structure just punishes students who didn’t fully ‘get’ the concept in class. I like the idea of math homework and do believe it helps. But not in this form. These are like mini tests on subject matter not fully learned. The students can never use answers to find out that they were wrong and rework the problem perhaps finding a step that they missed. It did not give them ‘practice’ at all and punished struggling students in the end. Do any of you agree with this grading structure? I’ve read all of your comments and ALL of them seem much more fair and make sense than this. Do any of you have any suggestions as to how to approach next years teacher on this? This comes from a highly rated middle school in TX. I’m surprised that I can’t find an argument FOR this structure or even see it mentioned. Thanks for any thoughts or places I might visit for more information.

This sounds extreme, and as I mention in my post, I have a hard time “grading” math homework since it’s the first time students are getting to know the material. They’d also need feedback after giving it a go to see how they did. I’m sorry this has happened to your daughter. 🙁 P.S. We don’t follow the Common Core standards in Texas, but rather, we have our own TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills).

Yes it seems in the extreme to me to and that’s why I’m questioning it and want to make a good case against it with her teacher next year. I’m having trouble finding any statistics or research that clearly demonstrate the best way to handle math homework. Your site has at least given me a clear idea of how many teachers take a much different approach so I thank you.

I know that TX does not use Common Core Standards but TEKS does overlap with it. Additionally, even though it is illegal for schools to teach Common Core Standards it certainly does not prohibit them from using Common Core Curriculum. Case in point. My daughter just received a summer math assignment (the whole class did) to complete lessons through Thinkthroughmath.com. (funded by the Federal Government ) This company specifically states on it’s home page that it teaches Common Core . I chose the TX link and took the lessons myself. It is rife with Common Core methods. I just completed an application for a 14day free trial and will be taking the same lessons under CA which do use common core standards. It will be interesting how much difference there actually is.

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment to me. I appreciate it.

Good evening,

Thank you for sharing all this valuable info. I read though all of the post, and I too struggle with this homework grading policy. Presently, I am an 8th grade math teacher in NYC. I do work in a struggling district and have found that in the past many of my students do not and have not completed homework on a consistent basis. My school’s homework policy states that homework counts as 20% of the students’ grade and it must be actively present in our gradebooks. Many teachers in my school have struggled with this policy because the majority of the students do not submit homework. So thank you again for generating conversation around this subject.

I am presently trying to find a way to utilize homework in an effective manner in my classroom this year also. Last year, I did try to implement the flip classroom midway through the year, in hopes that my students would become more independent learners. I found this to be somewhat effective for some, but not for the majority because many students did not login into there accounts and review the notes/assignments posted. I’ve also tried to assign homework daily, but this too has been ineffective and has had a negative impact on the students’ grades.

After reading your above post, I do think I am going to try option two. I like the idea of the students recieving a weekly homework quiz that reflects the homework given throughout the week, and that they engage in a daily homework huddle (this is genius, I must say). I think I will limit my homework assignments to five questions a night. 4 simple to medium leveled questions and 1 challenging question (short/long response). This will also be my format for the weekly quizzes. There are a few question I would like to ask you about the homework huddle:

Approximately how long are the students in this huddle? While you are cruising the room during the homework huddle, are you asking the groups questions, or are you only listening to their dialogue to check for understanding? What does the flow of the day look like after the homework huddle? Do you review any of the homework questions?

Also I would like to create a page for my students and their parents, similar to your think link page. Could you help me with this? I would like to save and display all of my information in one central location. Thank you once again. I hope to hear from you.

I use an online homework system called MathXL for school. It is wonderful. I assign 20 problems a night. Students do them independently and they are graded as they do them. I set the program so students can redo problems as many times as they like with a potential to get 100% each assignment. I assign due dates (just to help students stay on track) but leave all assignments open until test day. On test day I enter in the grade book the % grade of each assignment. I feel that is fair as students have multiple helps online (right on the homework page) and unlimited tries. The only guff I get is from parents who think I should look at the work of their students each night. I volunteer to look at any written work a student turns in but really, if they get it correct online they don’t need me. For any student whose homework scores are 15% or less than their test or quiz scores I require them to write out problems because they are either cheating or using the hints too much and that needs to be corrected. MathXL is a free response homework system (not multiple choice). In bulk for schools it is only $15 per student – what a bargain – cheaper than photo copies of worksheets for the year. MathXL also has quizzes, tests, and a study plan that keeps track of objectives students have learned and those they have not mastered (if you link it to quizzes/tests).

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How To Grade Math Homework? – Teacher’s Opinion

If you are looking for a more effective method of math homework grading and assessing how your students are progressing you have come to the right place. In this article you will learn some great tips on how to grade math homework.

Simple consistent marking: Choose a certain color pen for grading and use this color only. Many teachers choose to use red because it stands out and creates a distinction for the students and parents in terms of what the student wrote and what the teacher has written. Red is traditionally a teachers color.

Regardless of the color used, students are going to find it intimidating if they see numerous corrections. Therefore, it is more important to keep your focus on the kind of mark you are making on the work sheet. Instead of placing a large X or a large circle around the wrong answers just draw a simple slash through it instead.

Don’t make more work for yourself than is necessary. For example, when a student gets an answer wrong, refrain from writing the correct answer next to it. Another thing that can confuse the students and the parents is to circle the correct answers and leave the incorrect answers. This can create the impression that the right answer is wrong and the wrong answer is right. You can get together with some of the more experienced teachers for some math homework ideas for grading math homework worksheet.

Don’t let your papers pile up: Instead of leaving ungraded papers on your desk to pile up, leave them in the file trays where your students turn them in. Looking at a stack of unmarked papers on your desk can become overwhelming. It can also look really messy especially if they accumulate quickly.

Don’t allow work to go ungraded for more than a week, this can be difficult to do at times but it is really important. If you have already tested your students on material there is no point in grading the homework after the test has been administered. This doesn’t allow you to determine whether or not your students understand the topic and neither does it provide them with any feedback concerning their progress.

Establish a grading time: Find a set time to grade your student’s assignments and stick with it. You might choose to do so during students morning work, or during the lunch hour. Whatever is more convenient for you, the whole idea is to make sure that you are consistent and this will prevent papers piling up.

Some teachers stay after school one day per week to get up to date with their grading. This is a good idea if you are a parent and find it difficult to concentrate at home. However, it is up to you to choose the strategy that works best for you. If you want to gain some more ideas on how to grade homework, you can go onto a math homework website where you can find plenty ideas on how to do my algebra homework and grade it online from teachers.

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A Simple, Effective Homework Plan For Teachers: Part 1

So for the next two weeks I’m going to outline a homework plan–four strategies this week, four the next–aimed at making homework a simple yet effective process.

Let’s get started.

Homework Strategies 1-4

The key to homework success is to eliminate all the obstacles—and excuses—that get in the way of students getting it done.

Add leverage and some delicately placed peer pressure to the mix, and not getting homework back from every student will be a rare occurrence.

Here is how to do it.

1. Assign what students already know.

Most teachers struggle with homework because they misunderstand the narrow purpose of homework, which is to practice what has already been learned. Meaning, you should only assign homework your students fully understand and are able to do by themselves.

Therefore, the skills needed to complete the evening’s homework must be thoroughly taught during the school day. If your students can’t prove to you that they’re able to do the work without assistance, then you shouldn’t assign it.

It isn’t fair to your students—or their parents—to have to sit at the dinner table trying to figure out what you should have taught them during the day.

2. Don’t involve parents.

Homework is an agreement between you and your students. Parents shouldn’t be involved. If parents want to sit with their child while he or she does the homework, great. But it shouldn’t be an expectation or a requirement of them. Otherwise, you hand students a ready-made excuse for not doing it.

You should tell parents at back-to-school night, “I got it covered. If ever your child doesn’t understand the homework, it’s on me. Just send me a note and I’ll take care of it.”

Holding yourself accountable is not only a reminder that your lessons need to be spot on, but parents will love you for it and be more likely to make sure homework gets done every night. And for negligent parents? It’s best for their children in particular to make homework a teacher/student-only agreement.

3. Review and then ask one important question.

Set aside a few minutes before the end of the school day to review the assigned homework. Have your students pull out the work, allow them to ask final clarifying questions, and have them check to make sure they have the materials they need.

And then ask one important question: “Is there anyone, for any reason, who will not be able to turn in their homework in the morning? I want to know now rather than find out about it in the morning.”

There are two reasons for this question.

First, the more leverage you have with students, and the more they admire and respect you , the more they’ll hate disappointing you. This alone can be a powerful incentive for students to complete homework.

Second, it’s important to eliminate every excuse so that the only answer students can give for not doing it is that they just didn’t care. This sets up the confrontation strategy you’ll be using the next morning.

4. Confront students on the spot.

One of your key routines should be entering the classroom in the morning.

As part of this routine, ask your students to place their homework in the top left-hand (or right-hand) corner of their desk before beginning a daily independent assignment—reading, bellwork , whatever it may be.

During the next five to ten minutes, walk around the room and check homework–don’t collect it. Have a copy of the answers (if applicable) with you and glance at every assignment.

You don’t have to check every answer or read every portion of the assignment. Just enough to know that it was completed as expected. If it’s math, I like to pick out three or four problems that represent the main thrust of the lesson from the day before.

It should take just seconds to check most students.

Remember, homework is the practice of something they already know how to do. Therefore, you shouldn’t find more than a small percentage of wrong answers–if any. If you see more than this, then you know your lesson was less than effective, and you’ll have to reteach

If you find an assignment that is incomplete or not completed at all, confront that student on the spot .

Call them on it.

The day before, you presented a first-class lesson and gave your students every opportunity to buzz through their homework confidently that evening. You did your part, but they didn’t do theirs. It’s an affront to the excellence you strive for as a class, and you deserve an explanation.

It doesn’t matter what he or she says in response to your pointed questions, and there is no reason to humiliate or give the student the third degree. What is important is that you make your students accountable to you, to themselves, and to their classmates.

A gentle explanation of why they don’t have their homework is a strong motivator for even the most jaded students to get their homework completed.

The personal leverage you carry–that critical trusting rapport you have with your students–combined with the always lurking peer pressure is a powerful force. Not using it is like teaching with your hands tied behind your back.

Homework Strategies 5-8

Next week we’ll cover the final four homework strategies . They’re critical to getting homework back every day in a way that is painless for you and meaningful for your students.

I hope you’ll tune in.

If you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.

What to read next:

• A Powerful Way To Relieve Stress: Part One
• A Simple Exercise Program For Teachers
• Why Your New Classroom Management Plan Isn't Working
• 27 Things That Make Your Classroom Management Plan Work
• When And How To Teach Your Classroom Management Plan

21 thoughts on “A Simple, Effective Homework Plan For Teachers: Part 1”

Good stuff, Michael. A lot of teachers I train and coach are surprised (and skeptical) at first when I make the same point you make about NOT involving parents. But it’s right on based on my experience as a teacher, instructional coach, and administrator the past 17 years. More important, it’s validated by Martin Haberman’s 40 years of research on what separates “star” teachers from “quitter/failure” teachers ( http://www.habermanfoundation.org/Book.aspx?sm=c1 )

I love the articles about “homework”. in the past I feel that it is difficuty for collecting homework. I will try your plan next year.

I think you’ll be happy with it, Sendy!

How do you confront students who do not have their homework completed?

You state in your book to let consequences do their job and to never confront students, only tell them the rule broken and consequence.

I want to make sure I do not go against that rule, but also hold students accountable for not completing their work. What should I say to them?

They are two different things. Homework is not part of your classroom management plan.

Hi Michael,

I’m a first-year middle school teacher at a private school with very small class sizes (eight to fourteen students per class). While I love this homework policy, I feel discouraged about confronting middle schoolers publicly regarding incomplete homework. My motive would never be to humiliate my students, yet I can name a few who would go home thinking their lives were over if I did confront them in front of their peers. Do you have any ideas of how to best go about incomplete homework confrontation with middle school students?

The idea isn’t in any way to humiliate students, but to hold them accountable for doing their homework. Parts one and two represent my best recommendation.:)

I believe that Homework is a vital part of students learning.

I’m still a student–in a classroom management class. So I have no experience with this, but I’m having to plan a procedure for my class. What about teacher sitting at desk and calling student one at a time to bring folder while everyone is doing bellwork or whatever their procedure is? That way 1) it would be a long walk for the ones who didn’t do the work :), and 2) it would be more private. What are your thoughts on that? Thanks. 🙂

I’m not sure I understand your question. Would you mind emailing me with more detail? I’m happy to help.

I think what you talked about is great. How do you feel about flipping a lesson? My school is pretty big on it, though I haven’t done it yet. Basically, for homework, the teacher assigns a video or some other kind of media of brand new instruction. Students teach themselves and take a mini quiz at the end to show they understand the new topic. Then the next day in the classroom, the teacher reinforces the lesson and the class period is spent practicing with the teacher present for clarification. I haven’t tried it yet because as a first year teacher I haven’t had enough time to make or find instructional videos and quizzes, and because I’m afraid half of my students will not do their homework and the next day in class I will have to waste the time of the students who did their homework and just reteach what the video taught.

Anyway, this year, I’m trying the “Oops, I forgot my homework” form for students to fill out every time they forget their homework. It keeps them accountable and helps me keep better track of who is missing what. Once they complete it, I cut off the bottom portion of the form and staple it to their assignment. I keep the top copy for my records and for parent/teacher conferences.

Here is an instant digital download of the form. It’s editable in case you need different fields.

Thanks again for your blog. I love the balance you strike between rapport and respect.

Your site is a godsend for a newbie teacher! Thank you for your clear, step-by-step, approach!

I G+ your articles to my PLN all the time.

You’re welcome, TeachNich! And thank you for sharing the articles.

Hi Michael, I’m going into my first year and some people have told me to try and get parents involved as much as I can – even home visits and things like that. But my gut says that negligent parents cannot be influenced by me. Still, do you see any value in having parents initial their student’s planner every night so they stay up to date on homework assignments? I could also write them notes.

Personally, no. I’ll write about this in the future, but when you hold parents accountable for what are student responsibilities, you lighten their load and miss an opportunity to improve independence.

I am teaching at a school where students constantly don’t take work home. I rarely give homework in math but when I do it is usually something small and I still have to chase at least 7 kids down to get their homework. My way of holding them accountable is to record a homework completion grade as part of their overall grade. Is this wrong to do? Do you believe homework should never be graded for a grade and just be for practice?

No, I think marking a completion grade is a good idea.

I’ve been teaching since 2014 and we need to take special care when assigning homework. If the homework assignment is too hard, is perceived as busy work, or takes too long to complete, students might tune out and resist doing it. Never send home any assignment that students cannot do. Homework should be an extension of what students have learned in class. To ensure that homework is clear and appropriate, consider the following tips for assigning homework:

Assign homework in small units. Explain the assignment clearly. Establish a routine at the beginning of the year for how homework will be assigned. Remind students of due dates periodically. And Make sure students and parents have information regarding the policy on missed and late assignments, extra credit, and available adaptations. Establish a set routine at the beginning of the year.

Thanks Nancie L Beckett

Dear Michael,

I love your approach! Do you have any ideas for homework collection for lower grades? K-3 are not so ready for independent work first thing in the morning, so I do not necessarily have time to check then; but it is vitally important to me to teach the integrity of completing work on time.

Also, I used to want parents involved in homework but my thinking has really changed, and your comments confirm it!

Hi Meredith,

I’ll be sure and write about this topic in an upcoming article (or work it into an article). 🙂

Overall, this article provides valuable insights and strategies for teachers to implement in their classrooms. I look forward to reading Part 2 and learning more about how to make homework a simple and effective process. Thanks

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