First Class Grading: How to optimise your university’s grading integrity

Education is always changing fast, but the last 4 years have unsettled even the most tech-forward institutions. With big cohorts, remote and hybrid examinations, and AI changing the game, it’s no surprise that grading integrity is a top concern for academics and staff.

At All the Ducks, we’ve been building EdTech solutions for Australian universities for 10 years. While a lot of software for teaching, giving feedback and examining has made its way into normal university life, grading is still often stuck in the 90s. And with the integrity of your institution so closely tied to the integrity of the grades you give, it’s important to find solutions that are accurate, easy-to-use, and low risk.

Keep reading for our advice on how to optimise your grading integrity across the board.

1. Keep consistent grading procedures across all faculties

The bigger your institution, the more challenging it can be to keep a hold on processes and procedures across the board. By implementing consistency across every department, however, you enable marking and grading to be rolled out with a lower risk of error, and higher accuracy in turn.

2. Make it easy for students to understand how their final grade is calculated

Anyone who’s worked with students knows that if they understand how to perform well, they’re more likely to hit the mark. A complex grading system, by contrast, can send students in the wrong direction, and get in the way of them doing their best. By creating student literature that lays out the final grading process in simple language, and equipping teaching staff to explain it clearly too, you can motivate and empower students to get the marks they’re capable of.

3. Keep a centralised source of truth for curriculum data

What we’ve often seen happen, with the institutions we’ve worked with, is that as different faculties implement different processes or grading systems, their curriculum data can end up digitally scattered. This of course makes it harder for academics to grade accurately, and it makes it harder to do efficiently too. By putting a centralised database into place, you can reduce the amount of time grade calculation takes, and increase accuracy at the same time.

What we’ve often seen at the institutions we’ve worked with is the decentralised management of curriculum data. Usually this data lives within either the mind of the academic or, at best, written down in a PDF. This makes the data impossible to utilise in automated processes and difficult for staff (both academic and support staff) to ensure that grades have been calculated according to the published course outline.

4. Automate the final grading process

A lot of academics still spend the end of session deep in spreadsheets to calculate students’ final marks and grades. Not only does this create a lengthy and complex process for the academic, it’s also highly risk-prone, increasing the chances of inaccurate grades being awarded. That’s why we built Grade Matter, an automated grading tool that’s easy for academics to use, efficient, and accurate. So you save valuable time, and your students can get the grades they’ve worked for.

5. Use tools that capture changes to grades

Along with putting grade calculation at risk, using spreadsheets creates further complications if any academic wishes to adjust a final mark or grade. With Excel calculations, it’s easy to make mistakes, and there’s also no secure way to record justifications of grade changes. With Grade Matter, the adjustment of final grades can be securely recorded, ensuring the final grade is still accurate. Crucially, this also creates the needed documentation in the case of an audit, or when a student contests a final mark or grade, so any enquiries can be answered accurately, efficiently and with evidence.

If you’d like to level up your institution’s grading integrity today, book in a demo with our CEO, Shane.