At the end of the semester, after the grades have been determined and released to the students, I will receive emails from multiple students appealing for higher grades.
A few years ago, my colleagues developed a large course (> 600 students) which is offered across multiple sections. They chose to adopt a "semi-closed gradebook" policy where the grades for the quizzes are released to the students, but the grades for most of the other assignments and the project are not released to the students. When I asked my colleague about why she adopted such a policy, they stated that the reason for this policy is that the class is large and she didn't want to waste time dealing with grade grubbers, i.e., students who complain that they should get a higher score for this or that assignment.
After a year, I inherited this course from her, and as the course leader for this course, I am able to make changes. In the last two years, I have maintained the "semi-closed gradebook" policy introduced by the previous course leader. However, I am wondering if I should adopt an "open gradebook" policy where the marks for every assignment are released. One benefit of such a policy is that if we make a mistake, e.g., a student submitted an assignment, but we gave the student a zero by mistake, the student can notify us of our mistake and it can be corrected. In addition, giving students some feedback about their performance in the course can help them to feel less worried and uncertain about how they are doing.
Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of an open gradebook policy?
Response to comments
Question in comment: Do you give students other individual feedback on these assignments, and just hide the numeric grade? Or do they get no feedback on them?
In the past, we do give the students their numeric score for some of the assignments. I would like to give the students some written feedback on their assignments, however, the graders are not very motivated, and I am unsure how the logistics should work for given written feedback. For example, should the grader send an email to every student individually to give feedback, which is more than 600 students?