Mr.
Reimer's Hints:
Open Ended Question Grading
When you answer open-ended questions, you are presenting more than just the ability to come up with the correct answer. Effectively you are practicing explaining your entire problem solving process.
Therefore, your solutions must be well organized and easy to follow, you cannot make those to whom you are explaining your solution "guess" what you mean, you must be explicit. You cannot be "lucky", your work must always use mathematically correct techniques/rules. Making two mistakes that offset each other is wrong, and the fact that you got the right answer is luck. You are being measured on being right, not lucky.
You will have to answer open ended questions not only on tests, the mid-term exam, your final exam AND the NJASK. I'm not sure how the NJASK points are distributed, but I can tell you that on the HSPA exam (the test you must pass to graduate high school), if you answer ALL the multiple-choice questions correctly, but answer NONE of the open-ended questions correctly, then you fail the HSPA. So you need to learn how to do this.
The official grading criteria is a little more generic, and the actual criteria used by those who grade the NJASK and HSPA are question specific. What I'm providing below is a good rule of thumb.
Grading Criteria: Open ended questions
3 Points - Very well organized; steps easy to follow, no inferences required, logical & accurate; AND correct answers highlighted.
2 Points - Organized; steps easy to follow, minor inferences required, logical & mostly accurate (only 1 or so minor errors); AND answers easily seen.
1 Point - Displayed understanding of main concepts needs to solve problem, but procedures incomplete, mistakes made in approach OR a major computational error.
0 Points - Student made multiple errors, work not easily followed, answer not identifiable, OR answer given without supporting description.
Oh, and the basic difference between short-answer questions and extended-response questions is that there is only one answer for short-answer questions. Extended response questions have multiple parts. You MUST answer all those questions, and organize your work so it is obvious what solution fits with each part.
Revised 12/11/10