Hugging the Curve: The Aspiration of Grade Transparency
Words by Bridget Scott (she/her)
If you’ve applied for a job, checked Student Records, or considered post grad-recently, you’ll have been reminded of the unpredictable but wholly central role that grades play in student life. Regardless of whether you're poring over readings and spending late nights in the library, or going months without checking Blackboard, grades heavily impact everyone’s student experience.
Despite the importance of assessment, there is almost no consistency across faculties, schools, papers, and teachers. When every class has different grading processes, that students have no say over, what happens when a grade that feels fair, let alone good, seems elusive?
For Ben, a lack of transparency of grading in a high level Maths course, coupled with a generally unprofessional assessor, has led to a semester that can’t end soon enough. When attending office hours to catch up on a missed section of an unrecorded class, Ben joined the Zoom call with his professor and another student. Rather than addressing content relevant to the call, the professor turned to Ben and announced he was currently marking their assignments and that Ben’s was “horrible, just horrible.” Despite challenging the professor's conduct, Ben has continued to be subject to discouraging public discussion about his work from the same professor. Tutorials are now a minefield of pointed remarks, such as the declaration of “stupid” mistakes on his work and commentary on how “the person in this class who made these mistakes doesn’t understand what is happening at all.”
While there are a range of obviously upsetting factors in this situation, one of Ben’s greatest sources of frustration is the obscure assessment procedures used by the course. The course is unusually small, and the professor has sole discretion in allocating marks, despite the expectation that STEM subjects usually demand answers that are easily identified as either right or wrong. No assessment schedule or marking explanation is provided to the class and all work is submitted alongside students’ names. Now, Ben is in the position of having concretely unfair interactions with his assessor but no way of measuring how his grades have been assigned and nothing to prevent his work from being targeted.
When asked about assessment policy, the University referred Salient to the Assessment Handbook—a 62-page document establishing the principles and processes used to appraise student academic work. Whether these are fit for purpose is unclear. Within it, VUW says that the values of validity, reliability, fairness, inclusivity, learning, and manageability should drive the frameworks used to examine the capabilities of students. However, the guidelines allow significant discretion for faculties to self determine their own rules within separate and additional bureaucratic procedures. On the question of assessment schedules—something that could allow Ben to see how and why he is being marked in a particular way—section 6.1 notes that a marking guide is only mandatory where marking is spread between different people, and does not require breakdowns of how grades are assigned to be published to students. As a result, Ben’s lone marking professor is able to abide by University guidelines to assign grades without explanation or accountability.
Even when guides are developed and provided to tutors, this is often not sufficient to prevent injustice or bad-faith marking from occurring. For Bella, an encounter with a Politics tutor stopped her from continuing with a subject she loved. Entering tutorials as a first-year, she was enthusiastic and keen to engage in robust discussion on the subject matter. When her tutor repeatedly made comments such as “all the left do is kiss puppies,” she regularly spoke up in class and offered her own perspective, even when it clashed with his. Once it came time for their first essay, still buzzing with fresher optimism and invigorated by the course’s content, she devoted herself to the assignment. But after spending weeks meticulously researching, helping friends, and editing what she considers even now to be the best essay she’s ever written, her grade was much lower than anticipated.
Like any committed student, she emailed the tutor asking for feedback. She received no response. After following up four times, he eventually replied to let her know that the paper was completely lost and provision of feedback was impossible. Determined to work out what had gone wrong, Bella reached out to the course coordinator. Within days, she heard back from the tutor who had since found her paper and discovered it had a completely different mark: two grade boundaries higher than the original. Cases like these, filled with plausible deniability and potential for human error, run rampant throughout university, but Bella wonders about all of those who don’t have the time, energy, confidence, or knowledge to advocate for themselves getting left behind as a result. She doesn’t participate in tutorials anymore.
To address this, the Assessment Handbook notes that every faculty should have “procedures specifying faculty requirements on assessment and moderation,” that includes tutor instructions, tutor support and monitoring of grades. But for Brooklyn, tutoring a compulsory Commerce paper has revealed big gaps in the grading process. While the assessment guide prepared for tutors by the course coordinator is excellent, “there’s really no way to know if what you’re marking is too harsh or easy.”
From her perspective, moderation is limited to the lecturer, who failed to attend six weeks of tutorial meetings, giving the papers a quick flick to confirm each one has a mark and no student has plagiarised. This hurts students and tutors. Brooklyn is left “constantly worrying that I’ve marked students wrong.” Meanwhile, students' names are on assignments, meaning she knows what grades they have received thus far and the pressure to mark responsibly becomes entwined with the guilt of potentially failing students who will have to retake the course to graduate.
This is a problem greater than individual tutors. Brooklyn wants to improve the quality of her marking, but in the face of structural underinvestment in tutor wellbeing, unless large numbers of people are unjustly failing, “I don’t get paid enough to care.” As far as traditional bias goes, training on cultural differences and factors that impact student engagement is restricted to an online learning module, where the existing pressures on tutors meant she simply sought to complete it quickly. The structural insecurity of casual academic labour means that even tutors trying their best are struggling.
For students dealing with unprofessional or unequipped assessors, support is possible. Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association Academic Vice President Jessica Ye and advocate Erica Schouten note it’s normal to find the transition from highly structured NCEA standards to opaque university processes—with no continuity, large discrepancies, and inaccessible resources—difficult to navigate. They emphasise that when dealing with concerns, talking to the course coordinator or a friend for support and prioritising your wellbeing are useful steps. Erica is able to provide confidential meetings to help students access their rights, advocate for their interests, and connect them to relevant services across the university bureaucracy.
Acknowledging that we care about grades can feel cringey to admit, but the role of assessment in student confidence and engagement as well as employment and study opportunities, means academic justice is worth fighting for. Balancing the act of improving accountability in assessment alongside the increasing pressures acting on academic staff is a long-term challenge. Mandating that faculties publish assessment schedules, mark anonymously, and robustly moderate, would strengthen the transparency of the grading process, but must be coupled with the necessary implementation by staff. For now, students should feel confident knowing that if assessors are acting in bad faith, support and advocacy is always possible.
Pseudonyms are used in this article to protect the privacy of those involved.