Grading: Avoiding Frustrations

It’s a high stakes environment, and avoiding miscommunications, errors and omissions is paramount to a pleasant experience for students, faculty and administrators alike.

On the surface to an outsider, grading wouldn’t seem like that complex of a process. Professors assign grades to the students, those grades are communicated to the students and logged into their transcripts. However, there is much more to implementing a smooth grading process than one may realize.

Students are under enough pressure as it is, and the last thing they want to do is question the integrity of the institution’s grading process. They need to be confident that the grades are going to be accurate and delivered in a simple, timely fashion. Understanding these expectations is critical to the institution’s reputation and ability to attract new students at the beginning of every semester. They simply cannot afford to make unnecessary mistakes in the process.

There are a few elements at play. There are grading curve compliance and submission criteria that must be understood and accounted for. There are approval processes that must be adhered to, and there are weighted formative and summative assessments that need to ultimately be calculated.

Then there are anomalies that institutions must be prepared for: extensions, exemptions, and exceptions. These all add a level of nuance that, if not properly addressed, can turn into nightmares for students, faculty, and administrators during the most critical times of the semester. These frustrations will inevitably spread and can ultimately affect the reputation of the institution in a negative way.

Fortunately, the team at AppointLink understands the ins and outs of this process and has developed the solutions that keep everything in a simple, centralized location. To learn more about what makes our solution stand out, check out our Grading Power Tool.