How to grade a test fast
A simple guide to scoring tests by hand: turning right and wrong answers into a percentage and a letter grade, and grading a whole stack quickly.
From right answers to a percentage
Grading starts with a simple fraction: the number of questions answered correctly over the total number of questions. Multiply that fraction by 100 and you have the percentage score. A test with 40 questions where the student missed 6 is 34 correct out of 40, which is 85 percent.
From a percentage to a letter grade
Once you have the percentage, a grading scale turns it into a letter. The common scale puts 90 and above at an A, the 80s at a B, the 70s at a C, the 60s at a D and anything below 60 at an F. Plus and minus grades split each ten-point band into rough thirds.
Grading a whole stack quickly
When every test has the same number of questions, you do not need to recompute the percentage each time. Work out the score for each possible number of wrong answers once, write it in a chart, then grade each paper by counting the wrong answers and reading the matching row. That is exactly what an EZ grader chart does.