Grading is essential to measure progress but should not drown out learning, new professors and teaching assistants said yesterday in a meeting sponsored by the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in Frist Campus Center.
"The grade is an important part of it, but not the only thing we are trying to get out of the grading process," said Natasha Zaretsky, a seventh-year graduate student in the anthropology department who currently teaches a writing seminar.
While many undergraduates focus their energy on the ongoing grade deflation debate, their teachers, in a series titled "Grading as a Teaching Tool," are discussing ways to shift the focus to feedback and improvement.
The graduate students, many teaching for the first time, discussed how grading can measure and facilitate student progress, how best to design and grade assignments and how to encourage students to value learning above getting good grades.
"Some students are so grade-focused. You hate to use the carrot and the stick approach," Daniel Stanton GS, a teaching assistant for EEB 211, said. "I was grading fairly, but it was viewed as harshly."
The reality of grading at Princeton can come as a shock to many students, especially to those who come from high schools where they earn very high grades, McGraw Center assistant director Kate Stanton said.
Diversifying grades at Princeton, however, can be a good thing.
"If it's always an easy 'A', then what have [students] gotten from their Princeton experience?" McGraw Center director Linda Hodges said.
Teaching assistants seemed to come to a consensus that balancing "a grade with what students are looking for helps them learn," Daniel Stanton said.
But that isn't always simple. "If we didn't have to grade," he added, "it would be easier for us too."
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