Jonathan Eckstein's Grading Procedures

General

• I usually use TA's or graders to grade homework assignments
• My normal policy is to allow collaboration between students on homework assignments, because the right kind of collaboration can assist the learning process, and the alternatives are too difficult to police.  However, student who just copy assignments should beware -- you will find the exams very difficult if you have not understood the homework!
• I generally grade all exams myself.  The one exception is described under "multiple sections of the same course" below.
• All assignments and exams are scored out of 100 points. 
  • Sometimes I grade out of different (usually larger) number of points and scale the results back to 100 points -- for example, a final exam might have 250 points, and your scored multiplied by 0.4 to get it back to the range 0-100.
  • Sometimes, points on different problems might be worth different amounts.  For example, if there are two problems on an exam, one worth 35% and the other worth 65%, I might grade each out of 100 points and then take your exam score to be 0.35*(question 1 score) + 0.65*(question 2 score).
• I don't assign letter grades to individual exams or homework assignments, just numerical scores in the range 0-100.
• I don't "curve" or alter individual homework or exam scores.
• At the end of the course, I combine homework and exam scores with the weights specified in the syllabus, to get an overall score from 0-100.  This score may contain fractions, and I don't round it.  
• In courses with formally monitored attendance, I then make a deduction for those with poor attendance.  For example, I might deduct 0.5 points for each class missed after an allowance of four absences for the semester.   On purpose, I don't announce the exact allowance and deduction for each class beyond the allowance until late in the semester.
• I then rank these scores, and try to choose sensible cutoffs between A, B+, B, C+, C, D, and F.  This is the point where I "curve" students' performance.  The cutoffs do not come in predetermined places, nor are they any predetermined distance from one another.  I don't just add some constant value to everybody's score and then use a predetermined set of cutoffs.  For example, 75 is not necessarily a "C", nor is 90 guaranteed to be an "A" (although I generally try to aim for that).  I just try to pick something that makes sense for the particular group of students.  For example, I might decide that a score of 88 is an "A", but that does necessarily not mean that you need 73 for a "C".

Multiple Sections of the Same Course

• When I have more than once section of the same course, and they have had the same exams and homework assignments, then I pool them together for grading purposes.
• When other instructors are also teaching sections of the same course and there is a common final exam, we divide up the grading work by exam question so there is a uniform grading scheme.  We then analyze each section's performance on the exam and use to allocate a number of A's, B+'s, B's, etc. to each section.  This allocation serves as a guideline to each instructor, but does not have to be followed exactly.  Instructors use the guideline, but also take midterm and homework performance into account when assigning overall course grades.