2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Grading requires considerable effort, and often is slow due to the time it takes to judge the quality of student work. The question studied was: does low-resolution grading reduce the time it takes to grade written work while maintaining fairness? A new grading scheme was developed to address these challenges and it was implemented in an undergraduate laboratory course in material science. The goal was to reduce the time spent grading while maintaining consistent grading. The course is taught to juniors in a mechanical engineering program; enrollment is 30 students. One of the course objectives is to help students become proficient in technical writing, and so most graded events are technical memos and reports. Student graders were employed to grade student submissions using the new scheme. Eight aspects of technical writing were emphasized in the course: grammatically correct, proper format, clear, precise word choice, concise, technically sound, thorough, and insightful. Each of these aspects was graded on a pass-fail basis in the memos and reports that the students submitted. The use of pass-fail grading was introduced to help make it easier and quicker to judge the quality of student work. Students received feedback in the form of pass or fail in each aspect with written explanation from the grader. To be consistent in assigning grades, student graders and the instructor developed a rubric, agreed on definitions in each aspect, and established an understanding of what constitutes passing, and what constitutes failing. The student graders and the instructor calibrated passing thresholds by iteratively grading, discussing, and regrading a subset of student submissions until grades were consistent. It was found that, once the decision criteria were commonly understood, grading was faster because it is easier to consider one aspect at a time, judge the work, and make a binary decision: pass or fail. The turnaround time was noted for six written assignments in two successive semester offerings, one with the traditional grading, and one with the new scheme. The result is faster turnaround with the new pass-fail scheme. Additionally, the instructor and student graders subjectively note improvements in writing quality over the course of the semester.