Letting students grade their own homework I am going to teach a course in algorithms to 2nd-year undergraduates. The grade in this course is composed of 90% exam and 10% homework. The problem is, this year we do not have enough personnel to grade the homework. 

Theoretically, it may be possible to change the grade struture and make it 100% based on final exam, but, this will reduce the incentive of students to study and practice during the semester, which I think will harm their learning experience.

So, I thought of the following scheme: the students will have to submit each assignment before the next TA session. The TA will explain the solutions during the session, and then each student will grade his/her own homework.

Sure, some students might be tempted to give themselves 100 on all assignments, but I believe this will not be very harmful since:


All assignments together compose only 10% of the grade, so every single assignment is less than 1%. Even if many students get 10% for free, the final exam is still sufficient to differentiate the good from the bad students. 
The group consists of excellent students (the top 20%, based on their 1st year mean grade). I believe most of them want to succeed in the exam, so they will take this as an opportunity to track their own progress during the course, rather than an opportunity to just get some points for free.


What do you think about this scheme?
I have used a similar technique, albeit in a course for nonmajors and at a time late in my  career when I was willing to acknowledge that my grading was often pretty impressionistic even when I had a rubric.

To maximize what students learned from homework and to minimize the time I had to spend parsing their answers, I would go over the homework in class while the students still had their papers. I asked them to comment on their work, with a different writing implement than the one they used at home. 

They could correct simple mistakes, flag serious misunderstandings, tell me which problems they were worried about. I encouraged comments like "I didn't understand this at home, now I do" or even "I didn't understand this at home and I still don't".

Then I collected the papers and read and graded them. That took much less time than it would have without their comments. It also gave me better feedback about problem areas.