Use recommended grading strategies

If you're a first-time Mastering user, you can rely on the initial grading policy settings for the Homework assignment category. These defaults are based on extensive experience from professors who've used the system for homework.

Our data from the last few years shows that schools report the largest learning gains using Mastering when professors do the following:

• Give a liberal course percentage to Mastering homework assignments (10%-20%).
• Include as many course-appropriate Mastering tutorial items in your assignments as you can.
• Charge for wrong answers.
  A small penalty for wrong answers discourages students from simply guessing. Because Mastering often gives helpful feedback when a student makes a mistake, it's important to ensure that every answer a student submits is one that they have some intellectual commitment to.
• If you charge for wrong answers, your students are also charged for wrong answers to hints. That is, if you charge 3% of the possible credit for a wrong answer to a main part, students are charged 3% of the possible hint credit for a wrong answer to a hint. Like the penalty for incorrect tries on multiple-choice answers, this keeps students from guessing their way through the item and improves student grades. See how this grading feature works (PDF document).

If you decide to change one or more of the default grading settings in a category or for a particular assignment, keep these points in mind:

• If you don't give a small bonus for unopened hints: We have found that students who would otherwise think more carefully about the item simply open all the hints first because they are free. Giving a bonus for unused hints is one way to provide an incentive for thinking first, without putting students off.
• If you don't either include some penalty for wrong answers or limit the number of attempts: Students who would otherwise think more carefully about the item might guess and hope that Mastering will give them some useful feedback as they wander toward the answer. However, some students actually learn this way.

  Note: The same penalties that apply to main parts of items apply to hints with questions.

• If you limit the number of attempts, a reasonable limit is 8 or 9. Our research has shown that 99% of students who ultimately obtain the correct answer to an item typically do so within 8 or fewer answer attempts. Five or fewer attempt is too few for many students' learning styles. The default is 6 attempts.
• Give some credit for late submissions. If you give partial credit for parts that are submitted after the deadline, you provide an incentive for students to finish those parts even if they need extra time. Studies of mastering students show that they return to items even well past the due date, for instance at the end of the semester, to review and finish work they didn't understand originally.