Norton's Dicta on Grading
1. Fairness. All students should be treated alike. They should all be given the same opportunities and held to same standards. If a student needs a special provision, be sure that similar provisions are available to all, should they also need it.
2. Transparency. Students should have or be able to get a clear picture of why they were assigned their grade. A major part of achieving transparency lies in setting assignments whose criteria for success are obvious. Vague assignment questions are opaque and thus troublesome in grading. In a test especially, you should be able to recite without hesitation exactly what a perfect answer would be.
3. Kindness. There is an imbalance of power between the person grading and person graded. It is disastrous for the person graded to feel that the power is wielded capriciously or even maliciously. You should want your students to do well. It should delight you when they do and disappoint you when they do not. The students should sense that and feel that you are on their side.
4. Time management. Grading can be a massive, time consuming burden. Be realistic about how much time it will take, so you do not get caught in an awful time crunch. Doing the arithmetic can save you. If you are grading 20 short papers and each takes 10 minutes to grade, that is 200 minutes = 3 hours 20 minutes without breaks. The entirety of the grading will likely take longer since few of us can concentrate without breaks for over 3 hours.
5. Attention. Where are your grading efforts best spent? My policy is to assign time in grading according to the effort put in by the student. I will spend more time on work that was clearly a major effort by the student and less on one that was completed in obvious haste.
6. The goal. Almost all undergraduate HPS teaching is service teaching. My primary goal in this teaching is to awaken a student's interest in HPS. I want them to experience the thrill of a great piece of history of science; or the satisfaction of tight philosophical analysis breaking through an otherwise baffling conundrum. That they have these sorts of experiences matter much more to me than instituting a strict regime of assessment. Students should remember the course for the intellectual curiosity it aroused and not the brutality of the assessment.