Too many NSU professors are lax with returning grades. In some classes, it has taken up to a month to receive a grade on an assignment. In other classes, professors don’t return grades at all until students get that end-of-semester email that their course grade has been posted. While there are many professors that do prioritize grading, other professors routinely fail to provide grades when promised. This not only breaches student trust, but negatively impacts education.
The point of grading, for professors, is to measure how well students are retaining and understanding material. Good grades, in theory, mean that a student has mastered the subject. If professors don’t grade assignments quickly, they have no way of measuring how effective their teaching methods are. By the end of the semester, or even a month after an assignment has been turned in, time has been lost that could have been spent ensuring that students are learning by changing teaching methods. Of course, professors are not responsible for whether students apply themselves, but professors should endeavor to do what they can to ensure students are mastering their classes.
For students, grades are essential to success in a class. If a student fails a test, but doesn’t receive a grade before the next test, he or she will not know what to work on to improve understanding of the subject. If a student gives a speech but doesn’t receive a critique on the speech before giving the next presentation, how will he or she improve the next presentation?
If students completed every assignment perfectly, there would be no issue with late grades, but students are there to learn. They’re going to get a few bad grades in that process. If they’re ever going to learn from their mistakes, they need to know about them right away, instead of a few weeks or months along in the syllabus when they’ve already made that same mistake more than once. Or worse, at the end of the class when there’s no more time to improve.
Understandably, professors have a lot of work to do, and grading often doesn’t seem like the most urgent task on their agenda. However, many NSU professors need to do a better job of prioritizing grading. Not only will students’ understanding of the course material improve, but professors will become better at relaying information to their students.
NSU’s Guidelines for Appropriate Conduct and Ethical Behavior for Employees, which can be found on the official university website, read: “Evaluation of student work is one of the fundamental obligations of NSU faculty and academic administrators… Grading should be done in a timely fashion, and consistent with standards recognized as legitimate within the NSU profession. A student should be given an explanation of the grade assigned.”
Although NSU’s website says that grading is a fundamental obligation of NSU faculty, the patterns of many NSU professors indicate that grading is, at best, a minor responsibility.
