Grading Tips

As a class assistant or mentor, you will often have to grade homework. At the beginning of each semester, Lead will hold a grading session which covers some basic strategies for homework grading. If you are a class assistant, your TA often will have some way that they want homework graded. If not, here are some guidelines to help:

First of all, there is no predetermined way that you must grade homework. Everyone is free to develop their own style.

• Encourage students to work in groups, and have each group submit only one homework.
• Students should highlight their answer cells in a bright background (yellow, green, etc.) so that their answers are easy for you to find.
• Grade more than one homework at a time. If you have two or three homework files tiled across the desktop, you can grade the same problem simultaneously on multiple homeworks. This also helps you to be more consistent.
• Try to be as consistent as possible when grading. Occasionally, a TA will give you an answer key, but usually you are on your own.
• Don't be lazy and get a huge build-up of ungraded homework files. A week turnaround on grading is pretty good.
• If you are grading for your first time, then you should expect that it will go a little slowly at first. If you are having a lot of trouble, then talk to a Lead about getting some help.