What does my graded paper mean?
There are two types of grading marks: those that mean you did a good job and those that mean you did a bad job. This list is by no means complete, but it will be updated as different exemplars of my grading get scanned in an posted.
Students often see these underlinings and think that it means that they are supposed to underline those phrases should they ever use them again. Actually, that is my way of pointing out something good. I underline what I think you got exceptionally right, so if you ever see underlining, you should give yourself a pat on the back. You deserve it!
The checkmarks mean the same thing as the underlines. It also means that you did a great job. Check marks are used to cover larger areas than underlines; or if I’m lazy.
I don’t have an example picture yet, but oftentimes people will get stickers on their work. In the past these stickers have been from Blue’s Clues, Sesame Street, Disney, etc. They are not designed to make you feel juvenile, but they are supposed to point to assignments that have made none of the expected mistakes (this can mean that you made a ton of unique ones, though). Enjoy getting “stickers”, as I’ve termed them, because they mean you are doing well.
A “-pts” mark in the margin of your paper is not me counting off double for the same mistake, it is just me putting how many points you lost in that section into the margin so that it is easier for me to calculate your final grade.
A mark such as this one means that I was expecting you to discuss or incorporate the words that I write out for you. For example, if the template asks you to “discuss Table 4″ and I don’t see a discussion of Table 4, I will write “Table 4 (-2)” out to the side. In this picture, the person writing the lab report didn’t mention that the data came from the class.
This is the same as above: it points out a missing piece of information. Sometimes there is not enough space to write it on the same line/paragraph as the section I am grading, so I write it off in the distance (with an arrow). In this case, the author forgot to tell me what type of antacid was being illustrated in the graph s/he is titling.
This type of mark means either to delete the words inside of the [ ]s in the future, or that everything inside of the [ ]s is completely and totally wrong. If the [ x ] is followed by a (-pts), then the point loss comes from the wrongness of everything within the [ ]s. When it is just one word, rather than a series of words, sometimes I’ll just put an “x”. Sometimes, so much text is wrong that the [, the x, and the ] are rather far apart.
This is another example of the previous two types of grading. In this case, everything within the [ ]s was wrong, and because I’m nice, I wrote out what should be there. Notice the (-pts) is because the answer is wrong.
The Front Page …
The date stamp, while not technically any grading of mine, is necessary for me to be able to grade your assignment. If it isn’t stamped, I won’t grade it.
Well, that brings us to the end of this tour of your grade. If anything wasn’t addressed here and you’d like to know what it means (good or bad), feel free to get in touch with me. If you felt that I took off points for something that was already in your report and was exactly as I’d specified (ie you mentioned “table 4″ but somehow I missed it and took off points for you not mentioning it), then you can fill out a regrades sheet and I’ll look over it.
