I’ve always been uncomfortable with the grading part of being a professor. As a student, I loved learning, particularly writing, but dreaded the judgment of an instructor and the harsh disapproval of their red pen. When I started teaching, grading was my least favorite part of the job. I’d obsess over minor discrepancies and second-guess myself constantly. Even when I felt I was completely fair in handing out a less-than-stellar grade, I worried about whether the student truly deserved a permanent mark on their record for something minor, such as forgetting to include a cover page. But I plugged along as a reluctant grader anyhow.

Then came the age of AI.

I am constantly seeing AI-generated papers, AI-generated emails, and even other AI forms of written communication from students. This has made grading, particularly grading written work, seem more unfair.

In other words, generative AI has poured gasoline and lit a match on top of an already flawed grading system.

While I understand that grades are still necessary and grade my classes in accordance with the institutional policies of the colleges I teach at, increasingly, I’m convinced that the widespread nature of AI provides more of an argument against grades in favor of some other model, such as standards-based grading or mastery learning. Here's why.

1. AI Adds To the Randomness of Paper Grading

Most educators, myself included, believe we grade papers fairly. Unfortunately, data does not really back this. In fact, much research that goes back to the early 1900s has found that when educators grade the same paper, there is huge variation in the scores given; for instance, one 2011 study asked 90 different high school teachers in the same school district to grade the same paper according to the same rubric. Scores this identical paper received ranged between 50 and 96.

I’ve noticed similar variations myself when I’ve observed the teaching habits of other educators I’ve supervised. What earns a B in my class might earn an A or a C in a colleague's, or worse, a D.

AI further unbalances this already unfair system. It’s clear that when we assign take-home papers these days, we’re creating a moral conundrum. Some students will use AI and receive good grades, while others won’t and might receive a poor grade as a result. This is not what any educator I know wants, but it is the default system that has emerged for handling AI.

2. AI Undercuts Motivation Argument for Grades

One of the main arguments for grades is that without any, students won’t do any work. Again, studies don’t really confirm this. According to one review comparing grading to feedback without grades, students who received feedback without grades achieved more and were more motivated to learn.

That said, I’m willing to grant that fear of getting a bad grade does motivate some students. Even I admit that I would worry about getting quality work from my students without some aspect of the fear-based motivation that grades provide.

The problem is that AI has already undercut this argument. In many instances, students no longer fear grades. Instead of grades motivating students to write, grades are motivating students to use AI to do their work for them.

3. AI Makes Grading Useless As A Ranking System

Another rationale for grading is that it helps sort students into various abilities, both for employment and for the next level of education. I never loved this as motivation for grades. Helping companies decide who to hire may have its uses, but it’s not likely to show up as an answer if you ask educators why they got into teaching.

Regardless, given how widespread AI cheating is these days, I wouldn’t place as much weight on grades as I once did. What I'm seeing in the world of writing education is that more and more, grades are merely a measure of how effectively a student is using AI without getting caught.

4. AI Makes It Clear Teaching To the Grade Isn’t Best

Almost all teachers I know rail against teaching to the test, but how different is that really from teaching to the grade? In fact, I believe that part of the reason students are turning to AI so frequently is that they’ve been taught implicitly that the grade, not their learning, is what matters. Therefore, when a tool comes along that can get that grade without work, there’s no reason not to use it. That is at least the way many of my undergraduate students seem to feel.

On the other hand, with my graduate students, AI use is nonexistent. That’s because they are in graduate school to learn to write, not just earn a grade. Of course, duplicating graduate student motivation for undergrads and K12 students isn’t easy.

I also know that eliminating grades overnight and switching to a mastery-learning method isn’t plausible. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive toward creating a new motivation for students; we may not succeed in this process 100%, but we can do much more as a profession to move classroom motivation away from grade-based fear-mongering. If we don't, I think our students will keep turning to AI, no matter how hard we try to catch it, and take-home writing assignments will become a sad remnant of the past.

Joshua R. Eyler gives the U.S. grading system an “F” in his new book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, And What We Can Do About It. In it, which publishes on August 27, Eyler makes the case that grades hurt academic success and are helping to fuel the ongoing youth mental health crisis.

Eyler is director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning and an education professor at the University of Mississippi. I recently spoke with him about how he came to these conclusions and the alternative grading systems he’s studied that thousands of schools are already using.

Is It True Grades Aren’t Linked To Academic Success?

One of the main arguments in favor of grading is that it inspires students to do work, and without it, students wouldn’t have any motivation.

The research doesn’t really support this claim, Eyler says. In his book, he points to a 2021 meta-analysis of many previous studies looking at the impact of grading overall. The study compared three groups of students, one who received grades, a second group that received feedback but no grades, and a third group that received no grades or feedback. The study’s authors note: “Overall results indicated that grades positively influenced achievement but negatively influenced motivation compared to no feedback.”

Perhaps more significantly, students who received comments without grades saw increased achievement and motivation. “Compared to those who received comments, students receiving grades had poorer achievement and less optimal motivation,” the study’s authors conclude.

And this research is not an outlier. “That work really confirms research that has been around for decades showing the [negative] effect of grades on performance learning and motivation,” Eyler says. “It’s a continuous thread that we see through these investigations.”

Why Do Grades Seem To Decrease Achievement?

Education scientists often talk about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Grades, most agree, are extrinsic motivators. “They're the prize, the candy, the reward that students get for following the rules and moving through the system,” Eyler says. “What we know about extrinsic motivators is that they are good for compliance. They work to get people to do things that they don't want to do. And so, yes, they can work to get students in seats, to get them to turn things in on time, to get them to participate.”

However, there’s a catch. “An extrinsic motivator can never guarantee that someone will learn just because they're forced to be in a classroom,” Eyler says. “Learning depends on intrinsic motivation which grades affect pretty negatively.”

Additionally, grades can often interfere with fundamental patterns of learning. “The natural way that we learn something from a scientific perspective is we try things out. We make a mistake. We get feedback on that, and then we try it again,” Eyler says. “This is a cycle that our brains are really built to go through as we learn new things and grades arrest that process before it can ever take place. So we get to the trying things out part, and then we get a stamp of how well we tried them out without the opportunity to benefit from the feedback and the trying again.”

Beyond academics, grades are consistently linked to stress and negative mental health in students, Eyler says.

But Isn't Doing Away With Grades Impossible?

Grades seem so engrained in our education system that even talking about a school without grades feels radical. But there are many that exist. More than 3,000 Montessori schools, including 500 public schools, are gradeless. Beyond these, many K-12 districts and colleges across the U.S. have embraced nontraditional grading systems, Eyler says.

“There are definitely some great models and examples of schools that don't have any grades, both at the K-12 and college level,” Eyler says. But he’s not advocating schools across the country pump the breaks on all grading. “I think a lot of this conversation is really trying to get from the traditional grading schemes that we're in now to reorienting students' relationship with grades by trying out some of the alternative grading models that people are using.”

Many school districts are moving toward standards-based grading, which is also referred to as competency or proficiency mastery grading. Other grading methods include portfolio grading, collaborative grading, and specifications grading.

“There’s lots of different ways people are experimenting with the kinds of evaluation that they’re using to release the pressure valve and put the emphasis back onto learning and less about the grade itself,” Eyler says.

What Role Can Technology Play In This Conversation?

Technology isn’t needed to move from traditional grading to another grading method but it can make it easier by allowing teachers to create multiple opportunities for success through their LMS or other tools.

Elyer points to a colleague at the University of Mississippi who offers an unlimited retake system on chemistry classes. To do this the professor created a vast dataset of questions. “She has all the possible problems in the LMS and it generates new exams kind of randomly pulling from that databank. So it saves time. It helps to automate the process,” he says.

Additionally, new software is being developed to translate mastery-grade transcripts into their traditional grade equivalents. Eyler says these later tools may be helpful but aren’t necessary because colleges can already evaluate non-traditional transcripts.

What Are The Biggest Grading Misconceptions?

Many proponents of traditional grades say that without grades there is no way to tell if students have learned, but that’s not true, Eyler says. “There's nothing inherent to a grade that is intrinsically connected to whether or not a student is learning something. We can give students that information through written or oral feedback just as easily as we can, in fact, better than we can, just by putting a 92 or a B- on something.”

He adds this idea is tied to another common misconception that grades are necessary to maintain rigor and academic standards. “That's not true, either, for many of the same reasons,” he says.

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An anonymous high school teacher recently wrote to The New York Times ethicist column, asking if a teacher could ethically use AI to grade student work while actively prohibiting students' use of AI to submit their own work. To this teacher, doing so felt hypocritical.

The column’s author, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at NYU, replied to the teacher that this mixed policy toward AI was ethical because the students need to practice writing while the teacher already knew how to grade. The real question, Appiah wrote, was whether AI grading tools could fairly grade students in a manner that helped them improve for the next assignment, like a skilled teacher.

As AI gets better and better, and more tools are available on the market, it’s an increasingly important question, as is a follow up: If AI tools can grade fairly and effectively, will students and teachers accept it?

AI Can Already Help With Assessments 

Deirdre Quarnstrom, Vice President of Education at Microsoft, says there’s a lot of interest in the question. “As I look across the industry, I think any potential task that an educator can do, there is organizations working on how to improve that, and how to make that better,” she says.

AI is already skilled enough at summarization to help teachers in the grading and assessment process, she says, by performing initial evaluations based on a set of instructions or prompts or criteria.

Michael Klymkowsky, a biology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is developing an AI tool that can help assess biology students' progress. Instead of grading, it’s designed to help inform teachers on where students are at with the material. However, he says it might already be able to do a better job at grading than humans in some instances, including a mega section for a course with grading done by time-strapped graduate assistants.

“Graduate students don't always have time to grade everything equally rigorously,” Klymkowsky says. He adds that adopting a system such as this might help teachers to not be as reluctant to assign short-answer questions because of the additional time traditionally needed for grading.

Whether or not school leaders would permit such a use openly, or if students would accept its use, is another question altogether.

AI Grading Obstacles and Concerns  

A recent pair of studies looking at AI assessments and writing found that AI wasn’t as good as skilled teachers, but was close and was probably better than overworked or inexperienced teachers at providing feedback.

Steve Graham, a co-author on both studies and professor at Arizona State University, says that a key to whether students and teachers become comfortable with AI-graded work are perceptions of its accuracies. “If you trust feedback from AI, then I think you're more likely to use it,” Graham says. One way to build that trust is through increased research and studies so its efficacy can be evaluated and best practices can be developed.

Still, it’s easy to imagine some teachers still being reluctant and students pushing back against poor AI-generated grades even though there is precedent for acceptance of machine-generated assessments. For example, state writing assessments are increasingly scored by computer programs less advanced than generative AI, Graham says. These tools don’t really analyze the writing, just the semantic and syntactic markers, while also assessing whether it's a match for good, quality writing.

“People were initially leery about that, but you're seeing that used more and more,” he says.

Although Graham believes AI grading and assessments overall can eventually help students learn and ease time constraints for teachers, he also stresses that we’ll need to always keep in mind the human element.

“The only reason I'd want feedback from AI is to make a paper better that I'm either writing for myself to explore something about me, or that I'm writing for other people to read,” he says. “The fear I have is that if we turn to algorithm-based feedback or feedback from ChatGPT, and we don't have other people reading our papers, well, what's the purpose here? And ultimately, we write for a purpose.”

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Plagiarism is an age-old problem. 

The word, derived from the Latin plagiarius ("kidnapper"), dates back to 17th-century English. Much earlier than that, in the first century, the Roman poet Martial used “plagiarius” to castigate another poet whom he accused of appropriating his words. 

In our modern world, however, the ability of students to find and copy others’ work is greater than ever before. While there are a number of in-depth and effective paid solutions that allow educators to verify the originality of student work, there are only a few free solutions that are worth trying.  

We have compiled the best free online plagiarism checkers. Several share a very similar interface and ad profile, suggesting a common parent company. Regardless, all were able to reliably identify the plagiarized passages and identify a source.  

Best Free Plagiarism Checking Sites for Teachers 

SearchEngineReports.net Plagiarism Detector
No account is required to quickly upload documents or paste text (up to 1,000 words) in Search Engine Reports. Paid accounts from $10 to $60 monthly provide premium features and allow word counts of 35,000 to 210,000. 

Check Plagiarism
Check for plagiarism efficiently with this user-friendly site. Whether you want to scan a text or upload a file, this tool will search for any plagiarized content. Sign up for a free account to access a comprehensive report that includes sources and exact matches. Educators can run up to 200 plagiarism queries and receive grammar and SEO feedback. For additional features and unlimited checks, users can upgrade to a paid account.  

Dupli Checker
Dupli Checker furnishes a hassle-free plagiarism-checking experience. With no account needed, users can check for plagiarism once daily. To access unlimited plagiarism checks and additional features such as downloading Word or PDF plagiarism reports, create a free account. In addition to its plagiarism checking tools, Dupli Checker also provides a set of free, entertaining, and useful text and image tools such as the reverse text generator, favicon generator, and MD5 generator.

PapersOwl
While PapersOwl focuses mainly on essay writing, it also offers a free plagiarism-checking tool. Users can simply paste their essays or website content into the tool, or upload supported files such as .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, and .odt files. Although the website allows students to pay for essays, it's worth noting that their plagiarism checker is genuinely free and can be used to validate the originality of any submitted work.

Plagiarism detector
Easily check for plagiarism without creating an account, then download the pdf report file at no charge. The site accommodates multiple languages, while allowing unlimited free checks of text up to 1,000 words. Flexible premium accounts are available on a weekly, month or yearly basis. 

Plagium
A fairly simple site in which users paste text of up to 1,000 characters and receive free Quick Search results. Easy to use and no account is required. Click on your results to see the matching text conveniently highlighted and presented side by side. Flexible paid plans range from $1 to $100, and support deeper searching and analysis. 

QueText
With a clean, well-designed interface, it’s a pleasure to use Quetext. After the first free search, you’ll need to create a free account. Unlike many other plagiarism sites, Quetext makes it easy to compare the free and pro offerings -- free accounts allow 2,500 words monthly, while the paid Pro account allows 100,000 words, plus deeper search capability. 

Small SEO Tools
Teachers can check for plagiarism in texts up to 1,000 words without creating an account. Accepted file types include: .tex, .txt, .doc, .docx, .odt, .pdf, and .rtf. This platform offers an array of other useful text tools, from word counter to text-to-speech generator to image-to-text generator. One of the most unusual is the English-to-English translation tool, which helps users convert American English to British English and vice-versa. Could come in handy if a friend says, “It’s brass monkeys out there, and now I need to spend a penny. Cor blimey, this day turned into a damp squib!”
 

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A bad grade can keep a student up at night but offers little in the way of constructive feedback. 

“When you think about a traditional grading system, there's one data point, 'I got a 75 on this quiz,' or 'I got a B on this essay,'” said John Camp, head of teaching and learning at the New England Innovation Academy. That’s part of why at his school the focus is on competencies rather than letter or numerical grades. “There are several data points for each assessment so that a student can understand what skills they're working on, and when they get that back with feedback, they understand how to improve,” Camp added. 

Camp and other education experts recently spoke about effective grading models at a Tech & Learning webinar hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray and sponsored by Otus. 

The webinar can be viewed on-demand here.  

Key Takeaways

Traditional Grading is Losing Points 

Matt Townsley, professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Northern Iowa, said COVID helped speed up trends in grading toward standards or competency-based grading that were already present. “We want to create a system, a gradebook, that honors that students learn at different rates and different paces. We knew that before COVID, but COVID just kind of highlighted that fact for us,” he said. 

Camp added, “Not only do students learn at different rates in different ways, teachers teach at different rates and in different ways. A lot of times, that's super challenging when we're talking about the arbitrary nature of 'This is five points, this is 100 points.'” 

Updating a Grading System Takes Time 

Despite what advocates see as advantages for competency-based grading, education leaders should not try to move their district to a new grading system overnight. 

“If you're considering a change, I would say take it slow. Don't try to do too much all at once,” said Kendell Hunter, user community coordinator at Otus and a former teacher. “Make sure that teachers have the right tools to work smarter, not harder. I was in a school that went through a three-year transition to standards-based grading. At one point I was calculating my conversions, we were all sitting down and our heads were just spinning trying to crunch numbers. We don't need teachers to crunch numbers, we need them to analyze responses, guide instruction.” 

Getting Parents on Board

The first step for school leaders looking to update grading systems is to start with the why. “Clearly articulate what the purpose of grades is going to be in your school,” Townsley said. “Do not start by saying, 'We want to buy an awesome gradebook,' or 'We want to do this little change.' Start by creating consensus within the school around what the purpose of grades is.”  

The next step is communicating that to students and their parents. One of Camp’s students last year told him that while he understood the competency-based system he wasn’t sure what to tell his parents when they asked how he was doing in the class. “I said, ‘Tell them what you learned. Tell them what you're learning. Tell them what you're working on,’” Camp said. 

Keeping Students Motivated 

A common question about competency-based learning is in regard to whether students will be motivated to do daily homework if they’re not being graded on that work. The panelists agreed that the role grades play in motivation is overrated. “I can confidently say that the grading scale did not impact motivation in my experience,” Hunter said. “The students who struggled with motivation struggled when we were on points, when we were transitioning to standards, and when we were full on standards-based.” 

She added, “In terms of motivation, I always had the most success when I focused on things that I could control, like the learning activities, the level of excitement, the safety that my students felt in their classrooms, that collaboration.” 

Standards Aligned Grading is Not Grade Inflation

Sometimes competency or standards teaching is accused of being grade inflation by another name. The panelists disagreed with that assessment. 

“I would argue that it's not great inflation because you can really target how a student is performing on a standard,” Camp said. “Getting points for homework – that's the grade inflation, just getting points for compliance. In a standards-based system where you're focusing on specific skills, it's very clear you can't just get a high mark if you can't do the skill well, so it's much more targeted than a traditional system.” 

Standards Aligned Grading Is How the World Works

Another argument against standards-aligned grading is that it is “not how the real world works.” Townsley disagreed with that. “Never in the real world is anyone ever expected to be perfect the first time and every time thereafter,” he said. “Our aim in the K-12 system is to help as many kids as possible, get it. That's our goal. That's why we exist. So we should be figuring out ways to provide students multiple opportunities to learn the stuff that we're teaching them.” 

Effective standards-aligned classrooms allow students multiple opportunities but students have to earn the opportunity to retry an assignment or test. “It's not some free-for-all where we hand back the test or the project, then 30 seconds later they're doing it all over again. It's much different than maybe it seems from afar,” Townsley said. “There's a ton of things in life that you don’t get a second chance on. But there are plenty of things you do. You can take the GRE exam multiple times, the MCAT exam multiple times, the ACT multiple times, the driver's license test multiple times. Some of the highest-trained professionals I know, surgeons, they practice and make mistakes on cadavers time and time and time and time again before they're ever allowed to practice their surgical skills on real people.” 

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Glimpse K12has launched a new tool to help educators identify and eliminate grade inflation, grade deflation, and systemic bias. ACE (Assessment Correlation Engine) helps administrators pinpoint and eliminate issues around the discrepancy of course grades and mastery of learning standards to ensure parents, students, and educators all understand student progress. ACE helps educators increase their eROI by ensuring the efficacy of their assessment process. 

Course grades are the primary method schools communicate educational progress to students and parents. Unfortunately, course grades rarely reflect mastery of student standards. “As our customers analyzed hundreds of thousands of student grades, it became obvious that most school districts have a systemic problem between how they assess student progress in the classroom and standards mastery,” said Adam Pearson, Glimpse’s Co-Founder and President. 

“Our customers discovered that the way they were assessing student performance in the classroom was not in line with standards mastery on achievement tests,” said Pearson. “When students receive A’s, B’s, and C’s in the classroom, both students and parents assume that students are mastering core concepts. Grade inflation happens when these same students test non proficient on achievement tests.” 

Grade deflation is the opposite problem where students with C’s, Ds, Fs score in the top 10% of mastery. This is a massive issue for parents and students because they start to believe things like ‘I’m not good at Math’. Schools are impacted as well because students suffering from grade deflation statistically become likely drop out candidates. 

By correlating student classroom assessments with any form of standards master assessment data, ACE automatically illuminates grade inflation, deflation, and bias so administrators can help educators refine their assessment practices to better reflect mastery.  

How it Works 

ACE correlates student roster data with any formative, summative, or classroom-based assessment for educators. Administrators and their faculty log into the system to review the correlations and identify opportunities for improvement. The platform pinpoints where grade inflation, grade deflation, and bias may be impacting student performance. Educators access ACE though Glimpse’s eROI platform.  

Tallapoosa County Schools is an example of a district that has already begun using the new ACE tool and seen important results. “The data we got from the ACE solution proved our concerns were real about grade inflation.  We had students getting As and Bs but their testing proved that they had not mastered certain basic concepts in their academics,” said Superintendent Joe Windle.  

Tallapoosa used these insights from ACE and the Glimpse platform to centralize their grading system, bringing teachers and principals together across the six schools. The district determined for each school what constituted a major grade and what constituted a minor grade, so they now have grading consistency across grades K-8. 

To learn more about ACE, visit https://www.glimpsek12.com/ace.

Administrative software provider Skyward announced it has become a Google for Education Build Partner. As a Google for Education Build Partner, Skyward will soon enable educators to conduct real-time grade syncs from Google Classroom to Skyward’s Gradebook solution in a beta program. 

Keeping student data synced between Google Classroom and student information systems has been a key issue facing administrators and instructors. With this collaboration, school districts using Skyward’s SIS will be able to sync assignments and grades from Google Classroom directly into Skyward’s Gradebook solution. 

The integration between Skyward and Google Classroom will also eliminate the need for double grade entries, reduce the number of tools teachers need to master, and lessen the possibility for error in grade entries. 

For more information, visit www.skyward.com/k-12 and fill out the interest form for the Classroom grade sync beta program here.

We’ve all been there. You just finished putting together a great instructional lesson or unit. Kids are gonna love it. They’re working together. Doing research. Creating stuff, not just consuming it. The historical thinking will be off the charts.

Then you realize . . . you haven’t created the rubric yet.

You know that clear expectations and feedback are critically important to the learning process. You know that rubrics can help you in assessing what students know and are able to do. So you sit back down and eventually decide to use four scoring columns instead of five. Six rows of criteria instead of three. Clear descriptors. Nine point font all crammed into your matrix so that it fits on one page. Definitely tons of feedback gonna happen from this beauty.

But it’s worth it, right?

Mmm . . . using a great rubric can speed up the grading and assessment process but they can also create other issues besides the amount of time it takes to create them. A student shows creativity way beyond what the rubric asks for in a way that you hadn’t anticipated and your columns and rows aren’t able to reward that. Or a kid spells everything correctly but the grammar and punctuation is terrible. Maybe she nails the document analysis but fails to use evidence in her claims and your rubric has those two things together.

And is there any way – other than individual conferences – to really know whether students actually go deeper into your scored rubric than to look at the final grade circled in the bottom left hand corner?

Yes, analytic rubrics are useful. I’m not saying rubrics shouldn’t be part of your assessment toolkit. They can help you develop and create assignments that are aligned to your end in mind. They can provide clear expectations for students and a way to share feedback. But they can also be difficult to design correctlyand may seem so overwhelming to students that the expected feedback we want never really sinks in.

And, sure, holistic versions are much quicker to create and use. So that’s nice. But they fail to provide specific and targeted feedback. You get a kid who wants to know why they got a two instead of a three or worse, he won’t ask at all. Missing the whole point of providing feedback in the first place.

So . . . why not look at a third way to the rubric game? And use some tech to make it even better?

This third way, called a single-point rubric, is a lot like an analytic rubric listing the different required component parts of an assignment. Like the KSDE version below, you would still have Focus, Evidence, Argument, and Conventions as rows. But instead of four columns of four, three, two, and one across the top, you have just three columns.

And here’s the kicker, only the middle column actually contains descriptors. Essentially, the single-point rubric simply describes what successful work looks like using the criteria for proficiency. One of the remaining columns is used to highlight things in the student work that are amazing and go beyond proficient. The other can be used to highlight ways to improve the work.

Let’s use the KSDE historical argument rubric as an example. Nothing wrong with the rubric, especially since someone else created it for us. But it can still have some of the baggage that all analytic rubrics carry with them.

So we take the second column, the Three column, and isolate it.

Using these descriptors, we can create our single-point rubric: 

This is basically copy and paste to show a quick sample. So you might want to tweak the Focus section or clarify more what grade appropriate strategies looks like in the Argument section. The idea is to make your life easier and student work better. So a single-point rubric doesn’t try to anticipate ways that a kid might exceed our expectations. It doesn’t try to describe ways that a kid failed. It just says . . . here ya go, this is what I want – leaving lots of room for student creativity and expression. It also allows you to be specific about ways student work can improve. 

 Quick review – why use a single-point rubric? 

• Simple to create
• Clear, specific, higher quality, and individualized feedback
• Focus is on feedback and improvement, not just a grade. (Great if you’re moving to standards-based assessments or away from traditional grading.)
• Allows for flexibility in teacher feedback without losing clear expectations
• Supports student performance and creativity beyond proficient
• Encourages students to actually read and internalize our feedback

Need some research-based evidence? Feel free to head over to this 2010 research project by Jarene Fluckiger highlighting rationale, impact, usage, and examples. And Jennifer Gonzalez has two nice articles here and here.

But. I can hear the buts.

 I like the idea but doesn’t using a single-point rubric mean I have to write more feedback? Instead of just circling cells on a rubric?  

Perhaps. But . . .  it’s more specific and more impactful than circling cells on a rubric. And with the Google Interwebs, there’s a quick and relatively painless way to make providing feedback a bit easier.

You’ll need to be using the Google Chrome browser and Google Docs for this to work – most of you are doing that already. First thing? Go to the Google Web Store and install the Chrome browser extension called Checkmark.

Once installed, Checkmark makes leaving comments on Google Docs super easy. Highlighting any text in a Google Doc opens a simple popup window that has a list of generic comments that every teacher might make on a student work. Spelling, grammar, repetitive language, passive voice, needs more evidence. Simple check the boxes with the comments you want to leave and Checkmark will insert those along the right hand side of the document.

The beauty of Checkmark is that you can create specific comment menus and add specific criteria to each menu. 

Using Google Classroom would make this even easier. Paste in your rubric into the assignment, share it with students via Classroom. When kids submit their work, you have the option to use Checkmark both on the rubric and throughout the work is you want.

No. Checkmark won’t work for every comment you’ll need, (one of the selling points of a single-point rubric is to deliver student specific feedback) you’re going to have to actually type some stuff in now and again. But Checkmark will help with the basics, giving you more time to do that.

And isn’t that the idea? So give single-point rubrics a try. Together with Checkmark, your kids are gonna walk away smarter. 

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant forESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

Engrade

Deliver solid content, crunch data with connected LMS/grading platform

Pros: Beyond the grading and reporting platform, there are useful instruction and assessment tools like wikis, flash cards, and quizzes.

Cons: Success hinges on consistent use from all stakeholders, and making the most of all the features can be overwhelming.

Bottom Line: With time-saving tools and accessible third-party content, this gradebook is a solid choice for its extensive, district-level features.

[Digital and Hands-On Combine to Challenge Kids Exploring STEM Applications]

Read more here.

Site of the Week picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best edtech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

Kevin Hogan interviews Gisela Albuquerque Weise, Marketing Specialist for Canon US, about Canon’s Intelligent Grading Solution. Their new cloud-base product allows teachers to save time when uploading test scores and exporting data so they can focus on the parts of teaching that matter most. Educators are stretched thin, and this solution helps them maximize their resources.

FreshGrade

A fresh way to capture, document, and share student learning

[Free Classroom Collaboration Tool Earns Educator Enthusiasm]

Pros: Teachers can use mobile devices to document student learning and share information instantly with parents and students.

Cons: Lacks some tools for creation, like drawing tools and voice recording.

Bottom Line: Multimedia documentation tools help communicate learning and expand assessment, and the addition of a gradebook sets this tool apart; still, student experience could use some polish.

Read more here.

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

The Answer Pad is an educational tool with two powerful functionalities: it is both a student response system with a focus on drawing and "show what you know," and a grading solution for teacher-created quizzes. Browser-based for teachers, it works on any device (BYOD), browser or on free apps for iOS or Android for students. It is an ideal tool for engaging students for any grade/subject area, and turning a classroom paperless.

New Features

Interactive

• Quick Connect - no student registration required or prep time for teachers (login via a code).
• Feedback - color and text feedback with the unlock, so that students can retry their answer.
• Broadcast - teachers can send out one of the students responses to the entire class. This is great way for classroom discussion with the names hidden.
• Send a Web Page - Teacher can send a web page, video, etc to students so they can view w/out having to leave the interactive session.
• quick checks for understanding by just asking questions and sending a response type make it super simple.
• draw tool can easily be sent out for students to work through a problem, etc.
• Hide names, send out a multi-step problem. Students complete the first step and classroom discusses the anonymous responses. As a group decide which answer is best and broadcast response to entire class.
• Yes or No; students discuss response and incorrect responses can be sent to the group to correct.

Answer Sheet

• Essay question and multiple correct multiple choice question types now available. These work in conduction w/ the built-in scratch pad that allows a teacher to see and give partial credit for work.
• Live Monitor - watch live as students work through an assessment

More resources

• Overview presentation
• Interactive step by step guide

Check out Answer Pad by clicking here. Below is a demonstration:

*The Answer Pad is an advertiser of Technology Tidbits.

cross posted at cyber-kap.blogspot.com/

David Kapuler is an educational consultant with more than 10 years of experience working in the K-12 environment. For more information about his work, contact him at dkapuler@gmail.com and read his blog at cyber-kap.blogspot.com