Grading students is an established part of university education. Few professors find this task a particularly pleasant one. Most bemoan the tedium and time required to read exams, correct papers, and to determine final grades, especially the lower ones. In some ways this is similar to the attitude regarding performance appraisals in business. Many managers shrink from giving performance appraisals as they do not have the right information to make an evaluation, and they do not feel comfortable judging another person's life. Yet, periodic assessments of performance are critically important. This chapter introduces some principles and techniques for evaluating students.

Why evaluate students?

The two primary reasons for evaluating students are (1) to provide feedback that contributes to their learning (i.e., the developmental objective) and (2) to render a judgment regarding their mastery of a body of knowledge (i.e., the certification objective). In the former, the evaluative signals we send to students (i.e., grades, comments, debriefs, etc.) can and should be given in such a way as to foster a student's “doublelooped learning” (Chris Argyris's term as used in Korth, 2000). That is, assessment feedback is a second-order input into the cues and content that students receive, process, assimilate, and adopt as part of their “sense making” (Weick, 1979) of the world within which they reside or strive to enter.