When digital humanities student Aarti, after days of anxiously waiting, finally received the grade for her master thesis, her world fell apart. She’d gotten a 5.1, which meant she had failed by 0.4 points. ‘I almost started crying, because I didn’t expect that at all’, she says. But her panic quickly turned into anger as she started reading the thesis report. 

‘It had factual mistakes, and was just very confusing. It felt like they didn’t even read the thesis properly.’ For example, the report mentioned there were bibliographies at the end of each chapter, a mistake Aarti corrected in the final version. 

So she appealed with the Board of Examiners, which assigned an independent third assessor. ‘But he gave me a 4.3, an even lower grade. And he called my thesis “semi-profound bullshit”. How is that even professional?’

What bothered her the most, though, was that the main reason for the failing grade was the lack of data analysis or empirical research methods. But that’s because it was a literature review, says Aarti. ‘Both my supervisor and the second reader said this doesn’t apply to my research. So it just makes no sense. It’s unfair.’

Iram – a pseudonym – who studies European law, has a similar tale. She was appalled she got a 4 on her first-year course in constitutional law when she had expected an 8. And that only got worse when she compared her answers to those of her friends. The same content, written down slightly differently, had received completely opposite marks. ‘It was extremely frustrating.’

Assessment policy

Aarti and Iram are just two of many students who are confused about their grades or feel their work was graded unfairly. So what does the grading process look like? And what can cause the inconsistencies and confusion these students complain about? 

It felt like they didn’t even read the thesis properly

~ Student Aarti

Lorena Florez Rojas, who teaches technology law, admits there’s some confusion about grading regulations at the UG. Every faculty has an assessment policy, but many lecturers don’t really know how to find it and are often not even aware it exists, she says. 

‘I had no idea either where that document was before taking a university qualification course’, Florez Rojas says. ‘Information isn’t centralised and documents can be hard to track. That means you have to rely on your colleagues a lot, which isn’t 100 percent reliable.’

Learning objectives

Ask any lecturer and they’ll give you the same answer: grading starts from a course’s learning objectives. ‘You have to sit back and think: what do you want your students to be able to do by the end of the course?’ law professor Edwin Woerdman explains. ‘Then you prepare questions for exams or assignments which can assess these objectives.’

That’s exactly what lecturers learn in foundational courses, says Marlies Venhuizen-Ter Beek, educational adviser and trainer at the Educational Support and Innovation department. ‘This is the first step to increase the reliability of grading. We always advise the lecturers we work with to critically assess their learning goals according to the SMART acronym – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.’ 

When translating these goals into an actual grade, it’s all about the grading rubric, and how detailed that is. ‘Criteria for a certain grade need to be defined in great detail’, explains Venhuizen-Ter Beek. ‘If you give a particular rubric to two examiners, they will most likely assess students’ work the same way.’

Key elements

To Woerdman, breaking down the exam into increasingly smaller bits is the way to go. ‘You divide the points over the questions and within each question, you distribute the marks per key element’, he says. But how important these elements are, and how you define ‘key’, is where the grey area lies.

Criteria for a certain grade need to be defined in great detail

~ Marlies Venhuizen-Ter Beek

‘You can tweak this importance, but then it has to be a fixed thing and clearly explained. That’s the significant part’, he adds. But then there’s also the challenge of partial grading. ‘It relates to how lenient you are, whether you give points for partially correct answers. You can be harsher, but then you have to apply that to all students.’

It’s a struggle that Arie van Steensel, assistant professor of history, recognises. ‘We have a lot of discussions among colleagues on how much a certain aspect weighs when we develop the grading rubric.’ 

They sometimes conduct intervision sessions, in which two examiners grade the same student’s work to see where discrepancies arise. While that is not a common practice because it’s time-consuming, Venhuizen-ter Beek feels that this calibration is most helpful to ensure fair grading. In the end though, Van Steensel admits, ‘grading also has a personal aspect to it.’ 

Subjectivity

Most lecturers would agree: there is some degree of subjectivity in grading because it’s still human work. For some, like Woerdman, it’s in the space you have for slight interpretations. But for others, like astronomy professor  Eline Tolstoy, it’s in the conflict of interest that comes from doing both the teaching and the grading. ‘I have this push that I want to pass all the students. It’s a strange conflict because I give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps a lot more than I should’, she says. That won’t make the difference between a 5 and a 7, she stresses: it’s on a much smaller scale.

But when does subjectivity become problematic? To Mara, an astronomy student – though not of Tolstoy’s – it was when she failed a course assignment that she had aced a year before under a different lecturer. ‘I had to retake Statistics for Astronomy, but the assignments they gave us were the same’, she says. ‘So I uploaded the exact same things I had the previous time.’

On the first assignment, she got almost the same grade. To her surprise though, on the second one, what was previously graded with a 9.5 only got a 4. ‘I was so confused. It just felt unfair’, she says. And the feedback didn’t help much either. ‘It was just two sentences per question, and those were fully negative too.’

She went to the lecturer. ‘He said I didn’t explain my process enough, but if I do, my grade might change’, she says. But even after implementing that, she only got a 6. ‘It was frustrating, but I gave up once I had passed.’

Lack of feedback

For many students, it’s the lack of proper feedback that makes grading so confusing. Iram recalls how frustrated she was trying to understand how she could improve her performance. ‘I went to the exam review, but the lecturers were so uncooperative. They kept telling me to look at the rubric, instead of explaining what I could do better next time’, she says.

If you explain it properly, students often understand

~ Arie van Steensel

‘They really didn’t look at it from a student’s point of view. They expected us to understand what we did wrong just from the two-sentence rubric, and that’s unfair’, she adds. Even though Iram got a 9 on her resit, she still can’t say what exactly she did differently. ‘It confused me even more, but I let it be.’

Communicating expectations and giving constructive feedback are the two things Venhuizen-Ter Beek sees as helpful for how ‘fair’ grading is perceived. ‘It’s your role as a supervisor to communicate what you expect from students about work standards. When giving feedback, too, it’s necessary to explain what’s lacking, but also what could be done differently and how’, she says.

Time-consuming

The lecturers seem to agree: the more feedback and justifications they give, the fewer complaints they get. ‘If you explain it properly, students often understand’, Van Steensel says. 

Tolstoy takes it so seriously that every time she gives an exam, she records a video explaining each point of the grading rubric. ‘You can’t give feedback to two hundred students taking an exam. But this helps to make things clearer’, she feels. 

However, what would help her most would be if the number of staff members was increased to match the expanding student numbers. This is not currently the case. ‘That means the quality of education suffers. It leads to more errors being made in marking exams and worse quality of teaching, as there is not enough time for discussions.’ 

Woerdman agrees. ‘Grading is definitely time-consuming. Every time I have to grade two hundred essay exams, I pray I won’t get ill. There are several weeks where I’m grading day in and day out.’

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