Thoughts on grading tests
I suppose I could make this easier for myself. Full marks for a correct answer, no points for anything else. There are teachers who do that and if I made the questions easy enough the students wouldn't even hate me for it. But this is not how I do things. I insist on trying to be fair.
I include some pretty difficult questions and I give some points for any sign of correct reasoning. I have to know all possible solutions (and sometimes there are more than I thought when I came up with the question).
When I see a mistake, I need to know where it came from. You can't grade someone's thinking without knowing what they were thinking, after all. Sometimes I have to try to make the same mistake myself. And it turns out that making the "right" mistake can be harder than actually solving the problem.
The creativity of their answers, both right ones and wrong ones, is amazing.
I include some pretty difficult questions and I give some points for any sign of correct reasoning. I have to know all possible solutions (and sometimes there are more than I thought when I came up with the question).
When I see a mistake, I need to know where it came from. You can't grade someone's thinking without knowing what they were thinking, after all. Sometimes I have to try to make the same mistake myself. And it turns out that making the "right" mistake can be harder than actually solving the problem.
The creativity of their answers, both right ones and wrong ones, is amazing.