Some thoughts on grading

Grading is always a touchy and emotional subject. When students misbehave, you automatically feel the urge to punish them with a bad grade. When students receive a bad grade, they will be angry and pissed off. And ‘bad grade’ is relative to what they expected, not ‘realistically bad’, like in a fail grade. In most cases, they will also think you are unfair if they honestly expected a better grade. And they will be gradually more pissed off, the more work they put in your class. So make sure you put as much thought into planning your grading scheme as into the rest of the preparation, because the grade might just leave the biggest lasting impression on students looking back.

 

The good student receives bad grade problem

I just cleaned out my old archived data and remembered I had this class with a teacher I really liked. But now, I hardly remembered her. Then I realized it probably had something to do with a weird bad grading situation that had left a sour taste with me.  Also, it happens that situations like this (and I defintely had more than one) were always in the Linguistics department. Anybody who knows me is aware that I am a language nerd, I love dialects, etc. I came to university really looking forward to studying Linguistics. Now I hate it, not because it turned out I disliked the subject but because of many bad grading situations where I felt treated extremely unfairly.

This particular teacher had doted on me during the class. I also loved the subject and participated a lot. Then I handed in the paper, and I don’t remember exactly what the problem was, but she gave me a really bad mark and said I could only turn it into a positive one, if I made major changes. A C, to be exact! Which was as good as a negative mark for a student like me with overall high marks. This would ruin my GPA. But then again, I had such a tight schedule that I couldn’t afford just redoing this class. This whole situation came as a huge shock to me. I felt I had written an ok paper, as far as I was qualified to judge. It was in my fourth semester only, so you probably can’t expect a publication-ready work. It would have been be ok if I had felt I had put in minimal work only and performed badly. But I had honestly really tried to write a good paper. And it’s not like you generally get a lot of help in how that is actually done. I’d given it my all and ended up being treated like an abysmal student who had personally offended the teacher by handing in such a bad paper. Also, once I already knew that the only thing I could do is rework the paper but would still get a grade which would ruin my GPA, I was not exactly super-motivated to put in a lot more good work.

I had seen the papers my colleagues had handed in, they were obviously less good than mine (from formal standards already) and left an obvious impression of having been done carelessly in a haste. I was profoundly shocked. Maybe the teacher had taken to me so much because she had seen herself in me and thus, expected a publication-ready output. The teacher was not very experienced either, so this misconception might have easily happened to her. Since, of course, I was only in my fourth semester, I was not able to deliver that level of high quality she had expected from me and thus, graded me way more strictly than my less good colleagues.

 

If a good student underperforms, ask what went wrong instead of lashing out on them

Dear teachers, something like this happened to me mulitple times and is a surefire way to make your students hate you in retrospective. You don’t want your best students to hate you, right? They will talk badly about you (as I sure did) and ruin your reputation for generations of new students to come! Especially good students will get very angry at less-good-than-expected results since, unlike really bad students, they probably actually care about their grade point average which you just ruined!  Some people’s stipends also rest on this GPA. Don’t be so quick to give out bad marks to students of whom you would have expected more. Try to clarify what the problem was instead of just being angry. That’s just childish. Don’t let students’ outputs scratch on your ego. Students probably really don’t care about you all that much and if they did, they sure don’t have a positive impression anymore now. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding? Especially if you had expected better result, it’s obvious you should investigate what happened.

Beware of thinking a good student is you. Don’t expect your good students to be scientists. They are not, despite their apparent motivations to be come full-blown researchers one day. By ruining their GPA, you actually negatively influence whether they will one day be able to become researchers.

 

On silence and introverts in class

Silence does not mean disinterest, like many teachers assume. It might just be that they’re an introvert. And even though they might have participated in the beginning of the course, stopping later might not mean disinterest. To give a personal example, I often participated very actively in classes I was interested in. But then the teacher focused so much on me that I felt awkward and didn’t want to be the center of attention anymore. Actually I had never wanted or intended to become the center of attention. I therefore stopped participating because being the center of the attention made me feel uncomfortable. This, the teachers usually took as a horrible insult and were furious.

In multiple cases, I ended up with a really bad mark despite knowing (from having seen my colleagues papers) that my work had been well above average, if not even very good. Already formally, my papers were a few classes above those of my colleagues because I had way more experience writing papers than them. These times, I first wanted to complain. But then I was so annoyed that I never talked to the teacher about it. One teacher even told me my paper was an A but they would make it a B because I had stopped participating. I didn’t want to confront them and was ok with a B because, after all, it was true that I had stopped participating and found it to be their good right to take a grade off. A B, after all, would not hurt my GPA in bad ways. Then they put a C in the online system. That was pretty mean, seeing as my paper really was quite good (without being too fond of myself, but I had worked on that particular topic for a long time in another context already). The teacher offered no explanation for this behaviour except being hurt personally and stressed many times how good my contributions had been.

I’m sorry, extroverted teachers. Have you really never thought about the fact that it might be uncomfortable for a good student to be called out to answer questions all the time? It makes your fellow students dislike you. Please don’t take this as an insult and also, definitely don’t base your grading on it! You are scaring away good students. I continue to dislike this particular teacher after years. The lasting impression was extremely negative. This didn’t happen only once either.

 

Grade using check-lists to avoid mixing in personal emotions

I handle the problem of grading by having a check-list with points. So I don’t “grade” or hand out marks – they score on a check-list. That way, I as a person will not be the object of a student’s hatred. A lot of people actually recommend to do grading this way, especially if you’re still young or lack authority for whatever reason. That way, I can act like a mentor and trainer during my (very workshop-style) classes and still be fair in my grading.

Of course, coming up with these check-lists is some work in the beginning but it is very fair, good practice and will save you lots of trouble once complaints come in. And they will at some point. Another technique I find very useful is to ask a lot of the students (greater amounts of portfolio work to be done, in my case), but then am fairly easy on giving out points. That way, they feel like I grade so nicely, but they still have done more work than they would have otherwise, so it’s really ok when they all get very good marks.

Would be happy to hear how you handle these situations,

best,

the Ninja