Regrades and Appeals

“Grade grubbing” is a serious problem leading to an unjustifiable amount of work. We would rather be generous at the end of the semester in determining final grades, rather than debate half-point deductions throughout the semester.

There is a 24/7 time period in effect for regrades and appeals:

• Immediately after grades are released, we ask you to wait 24 hours before contacting any course staff about a regrade or appeal. This “cooling off” period helps to head off hasty reactions. Course staff have been instructed to delete or ignore any request that is made during the cooling off period.

• The deadline for making a request for regrade or an appeal is seven days after the original grade was released in CMS. Regrades or appeals submitted after that will be denied without consideration of their merits.

Regrades. Regrade requests will not be accepted by CMS. Instead, if there is something you don’t understand about your grading comments, your primary point of contact is the grader who wrote them. On assignments, this will usually be your section TA. You should feel free to ask them in person for clarifications or for advice on how to improve your work. But the grade on your solution and/or changes to your grade are “out of bounds” for discussion. If during the course of your discussion the grader realizes they might have made a mistake, they will volunteer to take a second look outside your meeting, fix any mistake they discover, and change your grade up or down accordingly. You are free to point out grading mistakes of a purely arithmetic nature, which the grader will happily fix immediately.

Appeals. If, after discussing your solution with the grader, you still disagree with your grade, you may appeal to a grad TA. Appeals are intended to correct serious errors in grading, not to dispute judgment calls made by graders. Graders do sometimes take off a little too much, but they just as often give a little too much.

1. Prepare an appeal by filling out this form. Your appeal needs to demonstrate that there was a serious error in grading, and that you understand the correct answer.

2. Arrange a meeting with a grad TA and submit a hardcopy of the appeal form to them. They will ask you to explain the appeal to them at that meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to make sure they understand your appeal. The purpose of the form is to serve as documentation. If your original grader was a grad TA, please make your appeal to a different grad TA.

3. After the meeting has concluded, the grad TA will review your entire solution (not just the part you were appealing) and make a decision about a grade change. Your grade might increase, decrease, or remain unchanged as a result of the additional scrutiny the appeal causes.

Resist the temptation to use appeals as a means to fish for a better grade. Here are two words of caution:

• Any appeal that we perceive to be specious will inspire increased rigor in rechecking your submission, and that often leads to a grade reduction.

• We track all appeals that are submitted throughout the semester. When we determine final course grades, we look carefully at students who are near the cutoffs between letter grades to see whether any extra consideration is warranted for adjusting their grade up or down. Abuse of appeals will factor heavily into this extra consideration.

Exams. Details for exam regrade requests can be found on the exams page.