Instructors' Ideas about Problem Solving - Grading

The Physics Education Research Group at the University of Minnesota has developed an interview tool to investigate physics faculty views about the learning and teaching of problem solving. In the part of the interview dealing with grading, faculty members were asked to evaluate a set of five student solutions and explain their reasons for the grades that they assigned. Preliminary analysis on two of the five student solutions was done on six physics faculty members from a large research university. The results seem to indicate that faculty members hold conflicting beliefs when grading: between valuing reasoning in student solutions and wanting to give students the benefit of the doubt. This paper will illustrate the hypothesis that physics faculty hold conflicting values when grading, and describe how the research university faculty resolved their conflicts.