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Grading

Harvard Kennedy School Grading System

For information on grade distribution, grade calculation, and policies on reporting and posting grades, please refer to Grades and Grading at the Office of the Registrar.

For information on grades required for graduation, please refer to the Degree Requirements at the Office of the Registrar.

Criteria for Grading and Evaluation

Instructors are responsible for establishing, communicating, and applying grading criteria. Understanding clearly how they will be graded has a significant effect on how students go about their work throughout the semester. (Most students would rather know what the instructor expects before writing the paper rather than finding out when they get their grades.) Hence both the grading criteria and the grading process should be as specific and as transparent as possible. In addition to the major aspects of an assignment or exam, students want to know how the following will be treated in the grading of it:

• Problems with English if it is not the primary language
• Typos in written work
• Arithmetic errors
• Organization, structure, and writing style of a paper as well as content
• Amount of original thought vs. amount of quoting from other sources
• Failure to cite sources correctly
• Partial credit for incomplete work (e.g., an exam problem where time ran out)

The Mix of Evaluative Devices

Grades are not just about scorekeeping -- they are about feedback and learning. It is helpful for students' learning if they have a variety of products on which to get feedback during the semester rather than just one midterm assignment and one final exam or paper. Good feedback early on gives students the encouragement to improve over the course of the term.

Criteria for Final Grades

The most common bases for evaluation are class participation, memos, problem sets, quizzes, exams, oral presentations, and papers. An instructor may use a single criterion or a combination. In any case, whatever standards are chosen must be covered in the Syllabus and communicated to students during the first week of class.

Counting Class Participation

The degree to which participation in classroom discussions is reflected in the final grade depends on the nature of the course and the preference of the instructor. Instructors should be particularly clear about the weight given to it, for many Kennedy School students come from teaching traditions where speaking up in class is neither the norm nor culturally accepted. For an expanded discussion of Managing Class Participation click here.

CAs and TFs can be helpful to the instructor in identifying those students who do not participate so that the instructor can take extra steps to encourage them. If class participation is a significant portion of the final grade, a CA or TF should be responsible for record keeping; the instructor’s memory is a risky tool for the final assessment.

Memos

It is essential to provide students with precise instructions about a memo assignment – what you want them to do, what your expectations are as to how well they should do it, etc. Give each instruction a one- or two-word heading. It will simplify the feedback; when you encounter a weak element in a student’s memo you can simply write “intro ¶?” or “wrapup?”or “clarity!”, or “Rx?” if the memo falls short on prescription.

Taking Assignments into Account in the Final Grade

Whether assignments take the form of problem sets or written work, taking account of assignment grades in determining in the final grade for a course requires caution on three fronts:

1. Training CAs and TFs. The instructor is responsible for ensuring that CAs and TFs who assist in grading assignments fully understand the instructor’s grading criteria and how to apply them. This means that the instructor has to train the CAs and TFs. See “Who May Grade” below for the types of grading assistance that CAs and TFs may provide.
2. Grading collaborative work. For complete information on grading collaborative work click here.
3. Ensuring academic honesty. Especially with problem sets, developing good assignments can be incredibly labor intensive (and the answer sheets, if required, even more so), so it’s natural to want to use and reuse a good assignment. This, however, runs into trouble if homework is an important component of the final grade, for entrepreneurial students will inevitably get their hands on last year’s answer sheets. The rewards for cheating loom larger, the learning that was the purpose of the assignments dwindles. See Problem Sets for an expanded discussion of this issue. With written assignments, reusing the assignments is usually not a problem. For a more detailed discussion of academic honesty, see Academic Code.

Rewarding Improvement During the Semester

Faculty sometimes give a slightly more generous grade to students who show marked improvement during the semester. If students are aware of that possibility, it helps maintain the motivation of students who did less well than they had hoped on the midterm.

Penalizing Late Submissions

The Kennedy School is a professional school, and as such has a responsibility for teaching professional standards as well as subjective matter. Penalties for late submissions of assignments, papers, and take home exams are entirely at the discretion of the instructor. They customarily take the form of a reduction in the grade for the late work. The syllabus should specify the size of the penalty.

Reporting and Posting Grades

Responsibility for grading rests solely with the listed instructor of the course. CAs and TFs do not have instructional appointments and are not authorized by the school to assign grades. Only in the situations described below may CAs and TFs be asked to assign grades.

Problem Sets

The situations in which CAs and TFs may grade problem sets typically fall into the following categories:

• Daily problem sets for which explicit answer sheets are provided by the faculty.
• Assignments where evaluation is indicated in terms of check, check plus, or check minus, etc.
• Assignments where what counts toward the students’ overall grade is only whether or not they turned in the assignment, not the grade the assignment receives. In these instances the grade is intended only to provide feedback to the student.

Written Work

For assignments that are not quantitative (essays, memos, papers), CAs or TFs may assist faculty by doing a “first read,” sorting the student submissions broadly according to quality and commenting on their merits and deficiencies. It is the instructor’s responsibility to ensure that the CAs and TFs understand what structure and substance the instructor is looking for in a particular memo or paper. Faculty must be solely responsible for grades in any instance where the grade depends on the logic used in arriving at an answer, or where there is a qualitative judgment made about the student’s work. While CAs and TFs may be asked to critique the work, the instructor should always add his or her own comments as well. The school’s standard is that the instructor will always comment on all papers returned to students. Students look for their grades, but they learn more from faculty comments.

Final Exams

CA and TF assistance of the “first read” type is permissible for exams as well as written assignments.

A Word to the Wise

Anonymous CA/TF grading invites student concern. Faculty should insist that their CAs and TFs always initial any student work they have graded or critiqued