The trouble with giving back marks

Imagine you work in a corporate job and your manager has some important feedback to give you. 

Your manager books a conference room. They send you some agenda items — ahead of time — of what they want to discuss. They dedicate a significant portion of the meeting to hearing your side of things. 

Following the meeting, your manager sends you a summary of what you’ve discussed and specific ways for you to improve. 

Now imagine you’re a Year 12 student receiving an assessment task back. 

You’re one of many nervous students in a classroom. Your teacher has given you no prior warning of your result. Your teacher gives a long preamble about how certain things were done well but there are many areas to improve and that, if you’re all serious about success, you should be…and so on.

Then you’re given your exam with the mark on it. Remember: you’re still in a room with many peers. You might get the chance to briefly discuss your performance; you might not. 

You might also have to wait for the teacher to start going through the whole exam before you can get to the question you’d like to clarify. 

This whole process is not ideal for students or teachers.

Can we do this differently?

It’s very difficult to give individualised feedback to students on their assessment tasks. 

I once got students to book times with me to receive their assessment task and get personal feedback. The only reason I could do this is that I had a class of 10. Clearly this is not feasible with a larger class.

I feel great tension when giving back marks. I know how important the marks are to students, particularly in Year 12. Personally, I know how valuable individualised feedback is, especially when it’s delivered one on one. Yet the opportunities to do this are rare and will likely impinge significantly on teachers’ time. 

I can hear your voice in my head: what’s the alternative? 

Remote learning forced a change

During 2021, we returned to remote learning during the Trial Higher School Certificate examinations. These are the big practice exams before the actual HSC. They are also assessable. 

Due to remote learning we had to conduct the trials and deliver feedback online. I had to scan all the marked papers and email them to students. I liked the process. I emailed the exams in advance of the class so they had a day or so to read over them and consider my feedback.

It also allowed them to do all the noisy comparing of marks BEFORE we got to the classroom. This was a huge relief for me. 

We’re back to face-to-face learning in 2022 but I’m continuing this process. For my most recent Year 12 task, I’ve marked and then scanned the papers. I’ll then upload them to Microsoft OneNote and email all students that their marked work is ready to view.

I’ll do the regular exam review once we get to class, going through key questions and providing general feedback. I’ll also dedicate some class time to individual queries but I use a formal review process for assessment tasks (which I’ll share in another blog post).

Does this process work?

I’m not sure of the precise answer to this question. 

What I do know about the process:

• It’s less public. If students don’t want to share their marks, they don’t have to. 

• In fact, it’s private. Students can read over their responses and my feedback by themselves, outside of the pressure of the classroom.

• It changes the nature of the class. It’s less about getting marks back and more about discussing their answers. 

• It’s time consuming for me. I’ve got another step of scanning and emailing.

I’m collating some student feedback so I’ll have that to share in time. But this process might be worth a try if you’re looking for another way of giving back marks at school.

Students don't lose marks

The student points to their exam paper, their finger sits right on top of their scrawled handwriting. They ask you:

“So, where did I lose marks?”

I find this question so frustrating. It’s like some students think they acquire a bunch of marks (sometimes even full marks) and then teachers pick away marks. Or that they start with full marks and then…I’m not sure. 

I’d like students to see things differently. I’d like them to see it more from my perspective. My perspective being:

As a teacher, I’m always looking to award marks. I’m never looking to remove marks. 

Marking is like building a house

Let’s expand on this idea. I try to communicate to students that, when I’m marking, I’m thinking of a house. The student starts with nothing, zero, a genuine greenfield development. Each element of their response creates the levels of the house — right up to a finished product. 

No-one’s “losing” marks here. To achieve full marks, students need to gain marks by demonstrating a true top-quality response. Every part of the response — each sentence, idea, quote, statistic, example, detail, connection to the stimulus — needs to go toward answering the question.

Each element of the response needs to add to the ‘house’. Any waffle or extraneous information will be ignored and not eligible for marks.

It could be helpful to think about the world of debating. In debates, adjudicators award points for the most relevant and compelling arguments. If an adjudicator hears an argument that just doesn’t land, they don’t remove marks. They don’t award marks. They simply ignore the comment. 

Same same for exam responses. If a student includes irrelevant information, it’s not eligible for marks. It’s insufficient to gain marks.

My current annoyance with marks

In terms of, well, everything, marks are extremely frustrating to me. You hold an assessable task. Students crave the marks. Teachers obsess over the marks. Then...the marks disappear and the process starts again.

In an ideal world, the marks would disappear and the feedback would stick. In fact, in an ideal world, students would compare feedback with each other, rather than marks. They would take the time to carefully consider the feedback that teachers have carefully considered. 

I have lots of grudges against marks. But today’s issue is that marks are a snapshot of where students have been, rather than where they could be.

Students are fixated on a number that represents a point in time in the past. That’s the mark. Feedback, however, represents where students could be in the future. I think that’s more valuable. 

There’s this great documentary on Netflix called The Playbook that looks at different coaches and their approaches. The first ep is with NBA coach Doc Rivers. He makes this great point about how coaches aren’t focused on where a player is today but rather where they could be tomorrow. And this is the power of feedback. 

Good quality feedback is like the road map to future success. Marks are like looking in the rearview window. Students have the choice about where their focus lies. 

Also: I’d really love to see students compile a list of all teacher feedback they’ve received and look to apply it to all their future tasks. It’s something I’ve suggested, but no-one’s bit so far.

I've got five marks on it

This week a student asked me: “For a five mark question, do we need to include five marks?”

So I gave them a great answer.

“No.”

A five marker question doesn’t need five points. You may only need three points. This is because a marker is not looking for a specific number of points.

What is a marker looking for?

• They’re looking for a clear and comprehensive explanation

• They’re looking for the use of relevant examples that are fully explained

• They’re looking for responses that directly address the question and do not waffle

I suggest you show your students a typical HSC marking rubric (see below). Look closely: there’s no mention of how many points to include. In fact, if you include five points that aren’t clearly explained, you won’t be in the running for full marks.

No mention of how many points to include.

I’ve also created a video to help students understand some of the ‘secrets’ of the marking process. I think it’s really import for us as teachers to try and demystify the marking process to help students do better in high pressure exams.

The most difficult task in teaching?

My toughest challenge in teaching? This is easy to answer. It’s handing back student work.

The power of assessments or exams is that it raises the stakes for students. It makes things count, in a really visible way. They know that these numbers will go somewhere: a report card, an email home, a university admission score.

But in giving back student work two things often happen.

One, students are focused on the mark and that’s about it. Now I’m not blaming them. The focus of assessments can seem to be about marks and ranks and how you did against your peers.

As teachers, we know that students are at their most attentive just before marked work is handed back. They’re poised on the edges of chairs. So we try to take advantage of it.

• We talk about how this work is part of a process and how students should use this as an opportunity to identify and address their weaknesses.

• We encourage students to ignore the marks for a minute and focus on the comments.

• We plead with students to think about how well they actually engaged with the questions.

Some students just want their marks. And not much else. But as I said, I don’t really blame them. They’ve got used to a process and don’t expect much else.

Two, we don’t give returning the work the time it actually requires. If we want the feedback to mean something, giving the papers back in a group setting doesn’t set up the ideal environment for reflection.

If I need to give the work back and I’ve got a 50-ish minute period then that leaves very little time for individual feedback and discussion.

I’ve tried a number of different ways to give back work in more meaningful ways. My current strategy, for the senior students (Year 11 and 12), is to give back work individually. Or at least part of the task individually. For example, I might give the students their multiple choice and short answers back as a group (without their overall mark). But then I’ll bring students up individually to discuss their essays and given them their overall marks (but not ranks and that’s a topic for another day).

This is not an easy strategy and requires a double period to at least hope to get through all the individual discussions. It’s also hella draining.

It’s all a work in progress but I find this task so challenging. Check out my video on the process below.