This week I am taking a course and exam for a professional designation. The exam is short answer essay and will be graded blindly. The facilitator advised we will each need to use a number on the actual exam and the number will tie in to a separate sheet we fill out. So far that sounded similar to my college blue books.

Then, he went on to explain the graders will start with test 1 and read/ grade the answer for question 1 and read all of the test/ questions 1 before going to the second question. They will then start with the test 40/ last # and read/ grade question 2 before moving on. Each question gets read and graded together so if the majority got a part of a question right then it would be reasonable to presume others should have. If none of us wrote a particular part, then the graders would not hold that part against us. He described this as building the answer key while grading.

This sounded fair and reasonable to me.

As a teacher or student, what do you think is the most fair way to grade an exam?