Grades

I have developed an auto-immune response to grading assignments. This is, of course, not to be confused with marking them. Marking is okay - marking compositions always harbours a certain element of anticipation and surprise, because you don't ever know what the kids will return you. You throw topics at them that will hopefully pique their interest, and they respond in often unexpected, hopefully remarkable ways. And I feel that marking has a real practical purpose, and, just as a piece of writing is an act of communication, annotating a student's script is also a form of teaching. Squiggles and symbols aren't as effective as real words and comments on a script, and once my kids get over the prejudice against red ink and the tendency of equating lots of red with lots of bad stuff, I do find that they are appreciative of the effort. Marking, then, is an integral part of teaching.

Grading, however, is different. It is a means of sorting out your students, to let them know which among them are allegedly superior students, who can produce higher-quality work. And I see how it can be useful, especially when you're new to a class and you need a benchmark to map what your class's abilities are like. But once you transform grading into an objective, and you venerate the grades and make them a benchmark for your performance, then the act of grading gets twisted into some perverse self-indulgent exercise.

It will strike you, straightaway, how arbitrary grading an essay is. If you were grading a math paper or a science script, the answers are right there for you to compare with, and it is clear where the student has got it right, and where he has lost the logic. However, in English, besides the comprehension short-answer questions, such factual checking is impossible, and grading comes down to assessing the relative quality of language use and content, the relative interest value in what the student has to say, and how he chooses to say it. And it is immediately obvious how judging the quality of these aspects is highly subjective. I personally find myself prone to being swept away by sentimentality, for example - and, when I try to stop myself being carried away, I am prone to over-compensating in the opposite direction. So you see the slippery slope of the act of grading.

And then, you add in the incompatibility of the criteria being used to assess the work. A numerical grade indicates something straightaway - that one student produces better work than others. But this misses out the nuances. So I have students scoring the same numerical mark, while one relies on the seductive power of his language to speak of nothing in particular, and the other whacks you over the head blatantly with incredibly complex ideas. And what of the two students who get the same Language mark, but one suffers for inappropriate sentence structures, and the other suffers for using the wrong tenses? Who's to say that one sin is greater than another? How can we say one linguistic achievement is as equally valuable as another?

Of course, then you try to rationalise with yourself, that the ends will justify the means, and the grade should not just reflect how masterfully the student handles his techniques for expression, but how masterfully he uses those techniques for a specific and clearly identified artistic purpose. The grade then reflects the quality of the communication - whether or not he uses the appropriate literary and structural techniques to give a nuanced impression of his central ideas, and equally whether or not his central ideas lend themselves, by their complexity, to be expressed lyrically and strikingly. But then, we all know how objective communication is. Language is communication - and communication is a function of expression and perception, and there's no alienating oneself and one's subjective influences from the process.

And then - the most irritating part - is the impression that you cannot produce a set of outlandish grades. I am told that my ProEd class should be averaging C's, but I am consistently getting a borderline A average from the composition assignments I have given them. Perhaps, on the one hand, I am looking out for different things when I grade these assignments. Perhaps I am approaching the grading process wrongly, emphasising the student's artistic flair when I should be looking at basic technical aspects like whether he has constructed a conventionally acceptable plot arc. But maybe, just maybe, they are producing higher grades because they are improving in the subject? I dare not think so, because my colleague assures me that they cannot be performing well. So here's another perverse self-reflexive influence in grading: the suppression of high marks because one is prejudiced against the abilities of the class. But then, how do you separate the influence of prejudice from real improvement in language, without the prism of experience to guide you?

So when I grade the assignments, I find myself second-guessing my decisions every step of the way, and succeeding to a large extent to poke holes in my rationales, with such fatal effectiveness that I am wholly unconfident in my ability to produce a proper set of grades, the quality of the marking being another matter entirely. I've tried as many methods as I can think of - first impressions grading (which causes me to have to go through the scripts again to revise impulsively inflated or deflated marks), sorting into bands (which is easier at first, until you have to distinguish grades within a particular band), and leaving all the grading till the end, when I've marked all the scripts and have an impression of who has better work, and use the scripts to cross-reference one another (which seems to produce the most holistic set of grades with the widest range, but costs a heck of a lot of time!). And, when you think about it properly, what is the point of grading anyway? I find it too much work to be worthwhile - just give a letter grade, and emphasise individual improvement rather than competition among peers. Isn't competition counter-productive, when you're learning how to use a language? Why spend time grading their work so much, when the wider world will be the ultimate judge of whether their grasp of language is adequate? What does it matter what a teacher thinks about your work compared with your peers' work, when only the real world will give recognition that matters to truly beautiful pieces?