I have not been in a “grading” environment when I work in the lab. All my assessments were formative and ungraded, although I gave students much feedback.

I’ve been conscious there is has been a strong move towards numeric values in evaluating student work, and analyzing that to improve instruction. I’ve given students a “formative” mid-chapter quiz from the dreaded textbook Friday.

First, I just looked through, and based on that and the questions that students had problems with while they were taking the quiz, decided, they had order of operations, but did not get exponents, or prime factorization. That took about 3 minutes of lookin’ and thinkin’.

I decided I needed to be more “professional” about this, and corrected each test, and then tallied how many right/wrong answers there were for each question. Lo and behold, I discovered they didn’t get prime factorization, or exponents, but could do order of operations as long as it didn’t have exponents. This took a little longer than glancing.

I wonder how often we spend a lot of time quantifying the obvious in our practice? For me, I’ll still do that more work-intensive analysis from time to time, but I’m gonna trust my instincts on how the kids did more of the time.