Request a Regrade: A Google Form You Can Have

I teach high school English. I have 140+ students. I like to give them a chance to improve their writing. I believe in performance based grading. All that together, means I get a lot of requests to re-grade work.

This used to be a fairly casual thing. Students would ask me, or send an email. I'd add them to a list. I've got that list somewhere, I'm sure. It was here a minute ago. Did I leave it at school? Did I add that new request to the list? You get the idea. I started to lose track, and things got missed.

The solution, like many of my organizational solutions, was a Google Form. Now, if a student wants me to re-grade a piece of work, they just need to fill out the re-grade request form. It's linked at the top of my class blog. If they email me or ask me in person, I remind them to fill out the form.

The re-grade request form gets to ask all the questions I would want to know about the student work. What's the name of the assignment? What did you do to improve it? Provide the link to your work. Is there anything else you want me to know about the work?

And then, all those submissions go to my next favorite tool, a spreadsheet. Not my inbox, not my ears, not a note dropped on my desk. A spreadsheet. All of it time-stamped and everything. I share the sheet with my co-teacher, and my student teacher. Any one of us can now see the request and re-grade the work. We leave each other notes on the sheet about the work or the new grade.

After a batch of re-grades are done, I copy and paste them over to the "completed" page of the sheet. That means we have a running record of every assignment we've re-graded all year long. If there is a question about when a student requested a re-grade, or how we handled that request, I have the receipts. This has been handy in parent meetings more than once. (My completed pages go back to 2015-2016, so this has been working quite well for me for awhile.)

You can HAVE A COPY of the form I use with my students to request a regrade. The form has a branching section (section 2). If you don't need that, click the three dots on that section and you can delete it.

Q: Don't some students just turn in badly done work because they know they can ask for a regrade?
A: Sure they do, but I have a few policies that slow that down. First, I won't regrade anything until I'm done grading all the original work from the assignment. That can take awhile. Then I might be too busy to get to the re-grades. See, I re-grade very slowly. My only promise is that I will get to it before I submit their semester grade. So, students who want to game the system may have to live with that poor grade for weeks. That doesn't mean I won't re-grade some quite quickly if it suits me to do so. I make it clear to my students that a re-grade request is a request, not an automatic thing.

Q: Can they ask for a re-grade on anything?
A: No, I make it pretty clear that re-grades are only for major assignments, essays, big projects etc. I'm not going to go back and give them credit for making up a journal entry from six weeks before when it is no longer relevant to preparing for their next big assignment. It won't have much impact on their grade and it's not worth my time. All of their work matters, but some of it matters much more in the short term, i.e. gathering thoughts for an essay, reflecting immediately on an experience. And other things matter much more in the long term i.e. showing they have mastered analytical or narrative writing techniques.

Q: How many regrades do you typically do each year?
A: I can give you the actual numbers. In 16-17 228, in 17-18 199, in 18-19 137, 19-20 75 so far. Interesting trend isn't it? The number of re-grade requests has dropped every year I've done this. Are students just less interested in improving their work, or is there something I've learned about the way my co-teacher and I teach and support them during the assignment so that fewer of them need to ask for a regrade?

Have more questions? Ask them in the comments below or tweet me @JenRoberts1.