Proctoring, Collecting, and Grading In-class Work

In-person touchpoints and assessments take up valuable class time and can be resource-intensive to administer and grade. What will be administrable will differ widely based on course size, instructional support, how you teach, and what tools you use to collect and grade student work. The following tips are among the most broadly applicable. Contact the Bok Center staff (bokcenter@fas.harvard.edu) for help with implementation in your specific circumstances.

1. In-class writing

  • Put an explicit, and ideally low word limit on in-class writing. Students write as much as they are allowed to, so state a sentence count in the prompt.
  • If students will write by hand, use standard printer paper, and scan and upload for grading in a platform such as Canvas or Gradescope.
  • If students handwrite, use AI to transcribe the handwriting and pre-sort the pile. The Bok Center can help you or your instructional support team set up this workflow.
  • If you collect writing digitally, use a Canvas Quiz with the Respondus Lockdown Browser. This gives you typed responses and automatic collection while keeping students off other tools.

2. Oral follow-ups and participation

  • Give Teaching Fellows a tracking sheet pre-populated with student names to fill in during class. Participation recorded in the room is more accurate and defensible than participation reconstructed from memory.
  • Use a structured rubric, and train the teaching team how to apply it. For grading participation, use a very simple rubric with two to four levels (check-plus, check, check-minus, absent). When grading oral checks for differentiation, the rubric should have multiple bands. Unstructured oral grading is measurably influenced by accent, gender, race, and articulateness. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Education found that structured rubrics eliminate measurable grading bias, because explicit predetermined criteria stop implicit associations from predicting grades.
  • Record oral assessments. A recording produces an artifact that a second grader can review. That is what makes norming across a teaching team possible, and it lets you answer a grade dispute with evidence rather than with memory. Assure students that the recording will only be used for grading and will be deleted after the term. You can also transcribe these recordings, to create a written form that may help focus grading to content instead affect.
  • Use Teachly for attendance and live participation tracking. It is an in-classroom application built for exactly this.
  • For large courses, schedule oral checks with teaching staff outside of class time. One institution ran 600 oral exams in under a week using scheduling tools and structured rubrics.
  • Let one activity do several jobs. A graded in-class follow-up is a comprehension check, a piece of formative assessment, and an attendance record at the same time.
  • Lower the stakes and repeat. Student anxiety about oral assessment is real and it responds to practice. Repeated low-stakes exchanges reduce anxiety and raise self-efficacy.

3. Proctored in-person tests

  • Sign up for the Alternative Testing Center for support proctoring tests with accommodations.
  • Give tests on standard, scannable printer paper, and scan and upload them for grading. (Standard paper is easier to scan than blue books because standard papers can be scanned as a large stack.)
  • Alternatively, give tests proctored in class using Canvas quizzes and the Respondus Lockdown Browser.
  • Use AI for handwriting recognition.
  • For classes with multiple sections, collaborate with AI to develop alternative versions of the test to improve test security.

Grading Participation

  • In addition to performance-graded in class assessments, if you are expecting or requiring attendance and participation in class, students will comply with your expectations if your grading scheme aligns with your expectations. See the Bok Center resource on techniques for tracking and grading participation.