A few notes on the grading of online discussions (both “Online Discussions” and Seek and Finds) that come up:
- A piece of general advice for dealing with reviews (this comes from decades of having research papers rejected): put youself in the mindset of “what did I do in my writing that caused the reviewer to … (miss the thing I wanted them to see, come to the wrong conclusion, not appreciate what I wrote, …)”. Learn from it: think “what could I have done to make it easier for the reviewer/grader to get my point.”
- There is noise in the process. This is why we average over a large number of observations (well part of the reason, we also want to account for people traveling, etc.).
- Putting #1 and #2 together: we need to grade a lot of these quickly, so if you want to be sure you get full credit for your work, make it easy for the grader to see that your posting satisfies the requirements. See Aditya’s advice. It is not enough that you have a “complete answer” – it must be easy for the grader to see that you have a right answer. (they have to go through a lot of things quickly)
- Hopefully, you will get a sense of what a good answer is from seeing others in the discussion. In general, we prefer that you do not edit your initial posting after you make it. If you feel like you’ve made a big mistake (for example, seeing other answers you realize you misinterpreted the question), put in an improved answer as a response to your post (and label it as such).
- There is an element of subjectivity to grading. That’s part of #2.
- An A (90) is the highest grade you can get. If you ask us to reconsider your A, you are telling us that you do not think you deserve it.
- Remember that we have to deal with a lot of these. Some small mistakes will happen, and we cannot always give lots of feedback. (see #2). We simply don’t have the resources to give everyone detailed feedback on every assignment, and small mistakes will happen. We try to give enough feedback that you can learn from it, and let the statistics work out the noise.
- We don’t like to argue with students about grades. If you say “I think my answer is complete/correct”, we are likely to say “yes, but I can also see how the grader would miss this, work on making your response clearer next time” – but we may say “I agree with the grader that this answer is not as good as the others that received higher grades, I think the grader was too generous.”