How Do I Grade My Students?

Overview

Understanding how Quinn scores resume and interview analyses are the first step in determining how to grade or evaluate your students. This article discusses how Quinn scores, as well as what you should take into consideration when grading or evaluating your students.

Grading

Quinn provides two different scores: one for resumes and one for interviews. For each category, Quinn evaluates different things.

Resumes

400 is the highest score that anyone can receive on their resume, but that is NEVER the goal for students (or even staff at Quinncia). Rather, they should strive to increase their score every time they upload a new resume. Students should use Quinncia as a tool to build and improve their resumes over time. For example, a first-year student should score lower than a fourth-year student because they don't have the skills or experiences yet that would give them a higher score.

The resume scores are broken down into 3 different sections:

General: Does the resume include their name, contact information, education, GPA, summary/objective, or proper sections on their resume?
Formatting: Are students using the correct formatting of words, phrases, and proper nouns? Are students checking their margins, font types, and font sizes? Are students spelling words correctly and do they have any grammatical errors?
Content: Quinn will go through a student's bullet points to find a technical skill, essential skill, and quantifiable outcome. Are your students writing relevant content to the industry of their interest?

Students also receive either a gold, silver, or bronze badge for their resume performance. These badges are awarded based on each student's performance in comparison to others at their university. Just like scores, badges should also increase over time. First-year students will likely get bronze badges, while fourth-year students strive to get gold badges by the time they graduate.

Gold: Top 10%
Silver: Middle 50%
Bronze: Bottom 40%

While performing in the top 10% may be desirable for students, they should ideally be focusing on Flags and Improvements. These sections include the tips Quinn provides to increase their score and helpful feedback about how the resume holds up to an ATS.

Flags: Edits that need to be made for resumes to parse ATS
Improvements: Optional recommendations for students to improve their resumes

The goal of our scoring system is to get students to think and ask questions! For example, a first-year student who has one experience (ie. waiter, cashier), graduates 3 years from now, and is not in any extracurricular activities will probably score low. The hope is that they come to you for advice. You can encourage them to get more involved with extracurricular activities or get another part-time job to diversify their experiences.

So, now you are wondering how you should grade. Here are 3 options:

Option 1: Provide Quinncia with multiple resumes that you consider to be very good and we will figure out an average score for your students by grade level. For example, you could take a few first-year student resumes and see how they perform. Our relationships team will likely tell you that they scored between 100 to 150. Keep in mind that second-years will most likely score from 150 to 200, third-year 200 to 250, and fourth-year from 250 and up. This feedback gives you an idea of how first-year students should perform. You can set a benchmark of 125 for first-years, whereas the benchmark for third-year students may reach 225.

Option 2: Watch your students' scores improve over time. The goal of this practice is for students to demonstrate how they improved their resumes and increased their scores over time. This option offers more flexibility to have consistent assignments and instructions across the board.

Option 3: Establish goals for each level of students. For example, you may require first and second-year students to have only 0 to 1 flags and show at least 3 core skills in their word cloud. Whereas you could require third and fourth-year students to have 0 to 1 flags, 10 or fewer improvements, and 5 to 8 core skills in their word cloud.

Interviews

700 is the highest score that anyone can receive in their interview. Again, this is NOT the goal for students. They should strive to continuously increase their scores as they take additional interviews.

Interviews are broken down into 3 parts:

Audio: Rate of speech, communication style, filler words, answer length, and technical and essential skills
Video: Eye contact, dressing, background, micro-expressions, and enthusiasm
Content: High-impact words, skills, and experiences that match the industry/position they are interviewing for

Students can receive up to 100 points per question. The scores break down into 25 points for Audio, 25 for Video, and 50 for Content. Content is weighted more heavily because it is the most important part of the interview. People either receive or miss out on job offers based on what they say, how they say it, and how they articulate certain questions/prompts.

Students also receive Flags for their interviews in the Audio and Video sections. The flags are critiques provided by Quinn when the student does something that could automatically reject them from the application process.

All students should strive to receive less than 10 flags for an entire interview.
Admins can provide extra feedback to interviews by adding flags and changing the overall score in the Content box. Quinn always factors your feedback in more heavily than hers.

So, now you are wondering how you should grade.

Each student's goals vary depending on what year they are completing in school. First and second-year students need to understand the basics of interviewing, like setting up their interview with proper lighting, displaying an appropriate background, and highlighting 2 to 5 skills during their interview. Each student should be able to get at least 40 to 50 points per question.

First-year students: 200 or above
Second-year: 250 or above
Third-year: 300 or above
Fourth-year: 350 or above (If fourth-year students want to challenge themselves, they can aim for 400 or above.)

How should you grade?

Here are examples of potential grading rubrics. Please alter the rubrics as you wish to the needs of your class: