Student dissatisfied with exam grade: what to watch out for?

By asking for an exam, the student asked you for a fair, honest, informed evaluation of their mastery of the course material.

If you believe that the exam grade fairly and accurately reflects the student’s mastery of the course material, say that, and explain why. Be respectful and honest. Stick to your guns.

In particular, you should have some record of your announcements of both the contents of the exam (“How was I supposed to know this?”) and your expectations for certain grades (“Why did I get this grade?”)—the course syllabus, or a handout, or email to the students. You should have sources/proofs for the correct answer for each question (“Why is this wrong?”), rubrics for awarding partial credit for partially correct or suboptimal answers (“Why did I get so few points?”), and well-reasoned rules for converting raw exam scores to reported grades.

If you do not believe that the exam grade fairly and accurately reflects the student’s mastery of the material, then you need to reevaluate the exam for all students. You’ve already done this by throwing out one question and curving the scores.

As someone who has had a few discussions about grades in exams, ranging from

me leaving the room after five minutes because they gave me more points than I would have given myself to

sitting there for over an hour and going from 59/80 to 70/80 (no typo) with one of the correctors joking he must have been drunk when correcting that exam when I called him the third or forth time for something he obviously missed (wrong multiple choice corrections, correct calculations marked wrong, calculations not seen and marked as not done).

There are two things a student (well, me anyways back then) wants. A sheet with solutions (and the rubric telling which parts of the answers gave which points) to compare theirs with (or you explaining every damn thing in depth, because how else am I supposed to judge that correction in a few minutes time?) and factually correct arguments. If you're wrong, admit it, and if the student is wrong, tell him/her why. I've had people telling me they can't give me those points because they didn't give them to others. That's no argument ... Don't do that. The answer (or partial answer) is right or wrong. It isn't “right, but ...“

You'll get students that don't care about that and just want points. Firmly tell them they aren't on a bazar. I'm sorry for those. But don't treat all students like that. I once had to ask three times for an explanation why my answer was wrong because the answer was “sorry, I can't give you points for that.“ Well yes. That wasn't the question.

It boils down to one thing. Be as fair and respectful as you want to be treated until treated otherwise. Like one should be always.

It can be helpful to have a policy for how to submit regrade requests. Here are some elements that can be helpful to include in that policy:

• Specify the format for regrade requests. It helps to specify that regrade requests must be submitted in writing, and must identify which problem(s) they believe was incorrectly graded and provide a justification for each problem they believe was incorrectly graded. Similarly, you should provide a response to their request in writing. It helps to provide an explanation or justification with my response.

• Specify the deadline for regrade requests. You should set a deadline. You might require that regrade requests be submitted within one week after the material was returned to them (or some other reasonable amount of time). This is important so you don't get people at the end of the semester submitting a pile of regrade requests for assignments they got back months ago, as a last-ditch effort to improve their course grade.

• Set expectations for how regrade requests will be evaluated. It may help to clarify up front that you will only regrade problems when our grading rubric was incorrectly applied; it's important to be consistent across students, so you can't accept requests to change the rubric or arguments that the rubric was unfair. On the other hand, if they found a correct solution that the course staff didn't anticipate on the rubric, and they didn't get full credit, please submit a regrade request so they can receive credit (but I recommend only following this in case of fully correct answers, not for partial credit for answers you didn't anticipate). It may also be helpful to state that in borderline judgement cases you will go with the original grade unless it was clearly wrong. Make your rubric and sample solutions visible to students.

• Encourage students to check sample solutions before filing a regrade request. It's helpful to make sample solutions to the exam available to students. Include comments about common errors/misconceptions here and there in the solutions, to help them learn. When announcing the regrade policy, encourage students to read the sample solutions before filing a regrade request, as their approach might be discussed there.

• Encourage regrade requests. I suggest you tell students that you're human and you make mistakes, and you want students to get credit for their work so if they suspect an error they should let you know so you can correct it. I suggest you tell them, please don't hesitate to submit a regrade request if you think the course staff made a mistake and we'll be glad to look into it. I don't like policies that try to penalize or discourage regrade requests (e.g., by a vague threat to regrade to their entire exam).

I also encourage you to set a policy with your teaching assistants and course staff, to tell them not to evaluate regrade requests in person, even informally. The scenario you want to avoid is where a student goes to a teaching assistant, shows them their answer, and the TA says "looks right to me, you should submit a regrade requests", and then the student submits a regrade request and it turns out they don't deserve credit. Then the student feels screwed, since they're getting mixed messages -- one TA said they deserve credit, but you aren't giving them credit. There are a number of reasons to discourage course staff from giving in-person off-the-cuff assessment like that. First, there isn't always time in person to check the details. Second, if the TA wasn't the one who graded that problem on the exam, they might not be familiar with all the weird corner cases or the policy used by the person who graded it. Third, we absolutely want to avoid cases where the off-the-cuff evaluation said "you deserve credit" but we actually can't grant their regrade request.