Protecting your Time in Academia: Strategies to Deal with Grade Appeals
If there’s one thing there’s never enough of in academia, it’s time.
Teaching, prepping, attending department meetings, grading, making the shift to online teaching, interviewing job candidates, sitting in on committee meetings, meeting with PhD students... The elasticity of those tasks can mean that you are constantly eating into your quiet thinking time, the time you reserve for working on your scholarly research.
So when students ask for feedback on their assignment, or ask for their grades to be reviewed weeks after the assignment was submitted, you don’t want to give up yet another 3-hour slot of writing and thinking time.
What you need are some readymade strategies to help you zealously guard your time, listed below.
But before we get to the strategies, remember that when students ask for feedback or for a grade review, they’re contacting you from a place of disbelief / frustration / anger / sense of injustice / all of them / many more. Whatever the reason(s), they are experiencing strong emotions. Your job is to manage their emotions and expectations before they get out of hand, because then you may have to spend even more time in putting the matter to bed.
Clear Time Saving Strategies
1. PRE-EMPTIVE MOVES
Gentle Reminder of Authority: Talk to your class at the very beginning about email etiquette and slip in this little nugget: “If you ask me to reconsider your grade, what you are really doing is suggesting that I didn’t do my job correctly. Think about how that’s going to make me feel. Do you think I’m likely to change your grade then? You’ll be better off simply asking for feedback.” Worked for me!
Peer Learning through Comparison: Always share two to three outstanding assignments with the entire class [anonymized and with those students’ permission]. This strategy is pedagogical gold – the students will learn and improve by seeing their peers’ work, without coming to you to make sense of their poor grade.
Response Bank: As you grade, create a list of common feedback items that you can draw from to provide this feedback WITHOUT having to re-read the entire assignment, secure in the knowledge that most mistakes students make fall squarely into a few set categories. You can pull out such gems as:
“For a well-written report, it is essential to use the SCQA and the pyramid method. The latter has not been used here. Had you created the pyramid first, your writing would be clearer and more efficient. Do give it a try next time.”
“This is a good first effort. With some focus on the points I mention above, you will do much better as you go along.”
Or even something as simple as “The essay focused largely on describing the phenomena rather than on analysing them.”
2. PUTTING OUT HOT FIRES
Email Only: The first, and only mandate, is to NOT schedule calls with the students. Reply only via email. This tactic removes the possibility of escalating their emotions and yours.
Postpone: Email to say that you have read their query and will get back to them next week – that’s perfectly acceptable. This move allows time to pass and for the rather high possibility of the students forgetting about how upset their grade made them, making the situation less volatile.
3. REDIRECTION
Direct them to the general feedback you provided for the entire class. Chances are they have not read it yet. And since that is one move you made, they are unlikely to make a counter move unless they are quite motivated.
BONUS: Strategies to Put off the Aggressive Student
When students push back by saying yours is the only class they received a poor grade for, here are three strategies to use:
Remind them that every class requires a different skill set – a language class compared to a class on urban planning compared to one in economics requires different skills, and then point out instances where they did not display the skill needed for this particular assignment.
Check their grade profile. Are they truthful when they claim their lowest grade was in your class or is that a giant fabrication? If the former, refer to the previous point, but if the latter, start a serious discussion about integrity.
Lastly, remind them that the grade review will be carried out by an external examiner, who is more likely to revise their grade unfavourably.