Standards-based grading, in which grading should be designed to communicate to students their current level of mastery with regards to well-articulated standards, is becoming popular at the K-12 level. As yet, the literature addressing standards-based grading at the university level is scarce. In this paper, I document my attempts to put into…

Part-time faculty now account for more than half of all faculty in American colleges and universities. Existing scholarship primarily has focused on the teaching effectiveness of part-time faculty. In this exploratory study, the authors employ a qualitative approach to examine the perspectives of part-time faculty members at a public, regional…

Teachers' grading in secondary education has been recognised as a 'hodgepodge' practice that incorporates both cognitive and non-cognitive factors (e.g. effort, participation, and attendance) to determine students' final grades. Consequently, students' grades are perceived to be an inaccurate representation of their academic knowledge. Hodgepodge…

Although group work is commonly used in university-level instruction, social loafing, domineering team members, poor attenders, and inequitable distribution of marks have been identified as obstacles to team-based learning. Peer evaluation has been proposed as one vehicle to address these issues. For use in grading, peer evaluations are often…

Assigning grades to student work, both during the academic term and as a summation of a student's mastery of subject matter, is a longstanding practice in all levels of education, from kindergarten through graduate and professional studies. Recently, a variety of factors have brought the criteria for assigning, and the resulting distribution of…

This study examined how secondary institutions define and implement institutional academic standards and progress requirements for federal financial aid recipients and how the federal requirements for academic progress affect the distribution of grades at these institutions. The study used a mail survey of a nationally representative sample of 200…

Higher education relies on student ratings to evaluate faculty teaching, partly because the alternatives (expert peer appraisals or objective performance criteria) are costly or unavailable. Because student ratings are crucial not only to improving instruction, but also in making or breaking faculty careers, it is important to assure that they…