In many cases, the best tips for evaluating students are those that focus on providing fair assessments, balancing the good with the bad, and helping students learn how to improve. For example, providing improvement suggestions during an evaluation is often more helpful than simply noting that a student performed poorly. Additionally, some tips recommend allowing students to evaluate themselves as part of the assessment process.
Some of the best tips for student evaluation are those that involve evaluating student writing. Often, these tips recommend providing detailed comments when a student has made errors in a written assignment. This is because such comments may help the student improve rather than just letting him know he made errors. For example, putting red marks through grammatical errors or writing short, exclamatory phrases may prove less beneficial than providing suggestions for reviewing the use of pronouns or possessive nouns prior to the next written assignment. Other tips recommend evaluating student work based on its content rather than just its technical quality.
A reviewer might also benefit from student evaluation tips that recommend working on evaluations when one is calm. Choosing to evaluate students when one is feeling a good deal of emotional stress may not prove conducive to providing a fair evaluation. Likewise, if a person chooses to evaluate a student right after something upsetting has happened in the classroom, the conflict could influence the evaluator's assessment or unduly cloud his judgment. Instead, a person may do well to take a break after a stressful event and then return to his evaluations once he feels more relaxed and capable of being objective.
Often, student evaluation tips focus on ways to identify areas in which the student needs improvement while also providing positive reinforcement. An evaluator can prevent a student from becoming discouraged by noting the areas in which he is strong, such as in his understanding of mathematical concepts or reading comprehension, while also pointing out that he needs improvement in vocabulary or his retention of history-related facts. When assessments are handled in this manner, students are less likely to feel that their performance is poor all around.
In some cases, tips that involve self-evaluation can also prove helpful. An evaluator may give a student the opportunity to consider his own learning experiences and progress, and then write his own student evaluation. While this won't take the place of an instructor's assessment, it can help the student analyze the areas in which he needs improvement on his own, which may motivate him to work harder.