Grading Criteria

I have been a Teaching Assistant for one year now, and I have performed several techniques for grading. The first class that I taught was an introductory class in Computer Science (CS 2401). For this class, I was responsible for grading quizzes and laboratory assignments. The way I graded the quizzes was by giving each problem (or question) a maximum number of possible points. That is, I weighted the quizzes in such a way that each question worth more than other questions based on the difficulty.

For the lab assignments, it was a little more difficult for me to grade them. First, I would run the programs, then I would check the source code, and finally I would decide the number of points I would give to each assignment. For this part, I had a grading criteria handout.

The first time I started to grade, I felt consumed by the huge amount of assignments I had to grade. I was very concerned with the time. It took me a lot of time to grade everything during my first two weeks.

To be fair, I graded both the assignments and quizzes based on a grading criteria provided by the instructor. Also, if the students were doing similar mistakes, I would reduce the same amount of points. Or, if some students turned in a clean and modular code (besides running correctly) I would give them more points.
Since this was not a writing class, the only thing they had to write was Java code. So, regarding this aspect, they struggled at first, but at the end, almost everyone succeeded in writing runnable Java code.

I helped them to write better Java code by explaining them the big picture first, and then moving towards the algorithms, and finally to the source code.

I did pretty much the same thing when I taught a course this past summer (2009).