How To Write Comments On Student Papers

Thanks for this: I try to give type 2) comments, although I have a tendency to completism which is less helpful than picking one issue and commenting on it in detail. But like Neville Morley and other UK academics, I’m under pressure, from administration and from students, to justify my marks by reference to published, allegedly precise criteria. I suspect that the wholesale model of type 1) comments wouldn’t satisfy the smart and ambitious student who comes to my office hours to contest her B+, and if I haven’t written grade-relevant comments while marking, I’m unlikely to remember that particular essay now.

How does that work when the student’s reason for asking for a higher grade is not the fairness of your grading, but “if I don’t get a B in your course I will be disqualified from the university, and I will have to go back to my own country, and my uncle who has borrowed money to finance my education will lose his house?”

How does that work when you have to grade 150 papers per week?

Commenting more closely on 2), if a large percentage of students are having difficulty with a particular area, it might be more efficient to deal with it in the lecture rather than individually paper by paper.

My father once set an exam with just one question: “Compose a question on the subject material in this course, and answer it. You will be graded on both the question and the answer.”

You would think that the students would like that, because you could concentrate on the area that you had really studied up on. But he said he got more complaints about that exam than any other in some 40 years of teaching.

Anyway, the other point is just as important it seems to me. Who is the professional and who is the client in this relationship? When you tell your students that the feedback you want to give is better than the feedback they want to receive, it amounts to telling them that the purposes they have for coming onto their programmes and submitting their assessments are the wrong ones. If you were to treat me like this I would consider it straightforwardly impertinent.

“The customer is always right”?

It’s a shame that students are now clients, and that higher ed has to be a market. Isn’t it just possible that the students have come onto the course and submitted their assessments for the wrong reasons? By implicitly accepting that they are just in it for the grades, not for self improvement, you are surely making the point that they need to be taught how to learn, rather than how to buy pieces of paper for the purposes of hanging above their desk, thereby improving their economic prospects.

More on the fairness issue than the content of comments …

I teach a large undergraduate course on inequality, where large = capped at 200 students. I administer in-class essay exams, 4 per term (although students can and usually do opt out of one). Errors in assessment are inevitable, both with the sheer volume of grading and students’ expectations that they’ll get their exams back within a week to ten days.

To make grading as fair as possible and opaque as possible, I double-grade every exam. (In addition to the graduate student TA assigned to the course — typically just 1, sometimes 2 for the 200 students — I hire a team of advanced graduate students by the hour to grade.) The grad students type their grades and comments into a spreadsheet so that the 2nd grader doesn’t see what the 1st grader wrote, so it’s blind double-grading.

Any exam with a full letter-grade discrepancy or greater gets triple graded, by me. I switch around teams and halves-of-the-alphabet so that students’ essays are graded by different teams throughout the semester.

This may seem like a lot of “extra” grading, and it is. Some of the time is recouped in that I rarely, if ever, get students who complain about their grades. At an institution like mine (US Ivy) and this many students, that’s rare.

But I also think that its time well-spent in that students are getting, and appreciate that they are getting, as fair a shake as possible. Double-grading was an eye-opener the first time I went this route: even with an extensive “crib sheet” for the graders that laid out my expectations for an “A” answer on each question, an “A-” answer, etc, the percentage of essays that needed to be triple graded was much higher than I had anticipated (10-15%).

A possibly-useful distinction between two ways that the student/customer might be wrong: (1) she might want something different from what would be best for her to have, e.g. she might want a qualification rather than an education; (2) she might want what would be best, but be wrong about the best means of getting it, e.g. she might think that education is best served by a point-by-point comparison between her essay and explicit marking criteria. I’m interested to know if Andrew thinks that it would be equally impertinent for John (or me) to tell a student that she’s mistaken(2) as that she’s mistaken(1), because I took John’s point to be about (2).

(By the way, Andrew’s blog is well worth reading, and particularly valuable for giving admin-sceptical academics like me some insight into how the other half lives).

While we’re reminiscing, my favourite lecturer at my university gave me the best feedback I’ve ever had, and it was definitely of the 2) sort. The grade was good, but not alluded to in the comments section, which gently pulled me up on everything from my abilities at counting electrons to my use of hyphens in compound structures.

The same lecturer was in charge of student examinations and set one of the finals – having freely admitted in a tutorial that his technique was to set something interesting, see how everyone did (“everyone” being the five of us taking that particularly course) and then grade us accordingly.

I still occasionally have strange dreams about his particular question, which was a full page diagram of one metal atom, inside a dodecahedron of other metal atoms, inside a god-knows-how-many-sided shape of yet another sort of metal atoms and the instruction to pick any three obscure spectrographic techniques that we liked and to explain what we would see and why. Brr.

Andrew at 15 – fair enough, John’s answer was certainly more interesting and reasoned than mine. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t stand by what I said.)

I also thought Sam’s distinction at 12 was useful, and John’s comment at 9 makes it clear that we are talking about the best way to help students/clients who do want education rather than qualifications.

So taking that as given, is it unreasonable to attempt to improve the quality of feedback, if you are still marking with legal and regulatory boundaries and your justification for grades is available to students that want it (just not written on the actual piece of work)?

Seeds@18

See Sam@2, I think.

I think you are effectively saying that it doesn’t ‘make sense’ to operate within the legal and regulatory constraints that UK academics & their institutions do, in fact, have to operate within, which doesn’t make much sense to me.

There’s a way to read this that makes sense, something like, “these are the rules, and you have to follow them, and if you don’t, it will be a lot of trouble.” That’s often so in life, of course. But I take the people objecting to be suggesting that the rules here are bad ones, and there should be better ones. How could that not “make sense”? It might be wrong, but it’s surely not nonsensical. Given the way that, to an outsider, British higher education seems more and more to be turning into a nightmare of bureaucracy, administrative bloat (even more than in the US, where there’s a very similar problem), and highly dubious “objective” measures, the idea that these standards ought to be questioned seems very reasonable.

Hi Andrew – sorry again for my earlier ill-humour, I find your point really fascinating (no sarcasm intended).

If we are considering students who simply want a qualification, no learning, then when you say:

(1) is what seems to me to be impertinent. If I value and respect your perspective … But I may not have that much respect for you…

the student is surely asking for respect (i.e. lack of impertinence) without providing any in return (i.e. willingness to be educated).

The architect analogy fails I think, not because of the different constraints operating on architects and tutors, but because of the different kind of service offered by them. The client in both cases is aware of their ignorance of the subject, but in the case of the architect, they are employing someone so that they do not need to personally overcome their lack of domain knowledge – their ignorance matters no more at the end of the process than the beginning. In the case of the tutor, the employee is there to give them the knowledge, and so the client’s ignorance relative to the architect is pertinent. To put it another way, the client who employs an architect to build a house can know nothing about how their house was designed at the end of the process, and still have a new house. The client who employs an architect to teach them architecture cannot remain ignorant at the end of the course and still be a new architect.

Unless you take the strong position of universities offer qualifications, learning as an optional extra (in which case, fair enough, but let’s be clear).

I think Sam at 2 is describing impracticalities with John’s suggestion, due to type (1) students – but the impracticalities are not an argument against the concept of providing better feedback in terms of learning rather than grades, so long as the academic’s back is covered in terms of their legal obligations.

And note that, in case you thought I didn’t get your little joke, one most certainly doesn’t have to be Socrates to be a real teacher as opposed to an assembly-line credentialler. So while it may seem clever to attribute the decline to the fact that universities are staffed by mere mortals, that’s not the case.

Seeds@24. Please don’t apologise: I’m enjoying myself.

‘the student is surely asking for respect (i.e. lack of impertinence) without providing any in return (i.e. willingness to be educated).’

I think you mislead yourself into false equivalence here. Lack of impertinence is the routine level of respect I expect to accord to and be accorded by everyone (except maybe on the internet) whereas a willingness to educated in the strong sense of that word you wish to use (rather than just the sense which suffices to pass exams) is a very high level of respect which I accord to few and never expect to be accorded to me at all. I’m not saying that the students are paying so they can do anything they like, but rather that your expectation of respect from your students should be lower – you have a right to common courtesy and to be treated like a professional, but no right to be regarded as a mentor.

And clearly the actual fact of the matter is that universities do offer qualifications, learning as an optional extra. I can certainly respect your regret that this should be so, but as a statement of fact it is incontrovertible.

The architect analogy is a poor one, and I don’t want to press it further, but to clarify the point that I was trying to make my architect does two things for me (a) ‘you’d be better off taking out this wall rather than that wall, as you’ll get more light’ and (b) ‘if you remove that load-bearing wall you’ll need such-and-such a steel beam to replace it’. My analogy was tring to get at A, not B which I agree isn’t even a poor analogy for education.

Sam@25. Isn’t Steve@21’s reference to Socrates appropriate here? Socrates refused to teach in exchange for money because, like you, he had a higher view of what teaching was than is compatible with providing a service in exchange for money. Unlike Socrates, I don’t actually myself think there is anything wrong with teaching for money, but I do think that if you are going to take the money you have to provide the service that is asked for even if it is not the ideal you would have aspired to outside the cash nexus.

Andrew, if I understand your position, it’s that the university exists to provide a service, i.e. the granting of a certificate indicating that the bearer has jumped through a certain series of hoops (possibly set by statute); the professor should confine him or herself to holding the hoop at the specified height and angle, and if a certain amount of kibitzing is inevitable the professor should nonetheless not expect the student to look to him or her as a source of hoop-jumping expertise, or take any heed of his or her advice on the student’s hoop-jumping technique, which nattering is in any case a distraction from the student’s goal of making it to the next hoop. Am I getting this right?

I’ve certainly seen (and taken) some courses that worked this way, generally introductory lecture courses in the sciences, nominally taught by research professors. It served the university’s purpose, namely weeding out of the sciences all those students not sufficiently talented, prepared and driven to learn the material on their own without aid of instruction, but as pedagogy or even as customer service it was balls.

A Pedant Writes:
Please use ‘they/them’ instead of ‘he/she/him/her’ when it’s desirable to avoid getting into a tangle over gender. I was taught this back in the 1950s in a London ‘grammar’ school (state) with a long and elitist tradition. So it must be correct usage!
As with economics – it’s amazing how much learning gets forgotten…
Now, what were you saying before I get distracted?

David @34
If you mean by ‘hoop-jumping’ what I think you mean, then no I don’t mean that.

Sam’s post @25 puts it really well – he has a vision of what learning Philosophy is or can be which is not just a bit different from what his students (mostly) think learning Philosophy is – they are not even related ideas. The processes that might deliver Sam’s vision are – to say the least – unlikely to be the same as those which deliver what his students think they want.

It therefore can’t be right for him to provide what he thinks is good and right rather than what they think is good and right. As he says himself, this isn’t a mere question of flavours such as chocolate or strawberry, but of him imposing his idea of what the good life is on them, and I would add under false pretences since we all agree that this is not what the students (or the vast majority of them) wanted or expected when they parted with their money.

Now one can imagine some completely different institution than the contemporary university in which different kinds of students gather for different purposes. You might prefer to work in that institution, and so might I, but the point is that none of us do. The way you could properly behave if you worked there is quite different from the way you can properly behave in the real, existing contemporary university.

In the contemporary university it is precisely expert assistance in hoop-jumping which most students want and which meets most of their purposes. You have every right to be horrified by that, to oppose it, to campaign against it: but not on time which the students have paid for.

Andrew, that would work equally well as an argument for why physicians should provide patients with the treatments which they think they want, not the ones which the physician thinks they need. In medicine we would rightly regard this as highly unethical. You need arguments, not merely ex cathedra pronouncements from your lofty perch as a “higher education planner”, for why things should be very different as regards education. The next such argument you produce will be the first.

Speaking of physicians, doctors are certainly a profession in which I would prefer to know that the paying client had received an education, rather than merely a qualification. Unless you have faith that no further knowledge or ability is required to be a good doctor than that required to pass an exam at medical school, it follows that the education is there to provide more than simply the qualification. Doctors need to be well-educated for the good of society, rather than simply for the good of undergraduate medical students looking forward to a lucrative career in proctology.
A less extreme form of this argument could be made for any social good that the university provides (making well-rounded students or whatever). Treating education as a simple business transaction is a rather arbitrary and short-sighted view.

John@39 I agree, and I erred in attributing to you the kinds of view that Sam set out in his comment 12 case 1. You set out the curriculum, the means of assessment and so forth and you support the student in achieving the necessary marks in the assessments which have been set. If the student think it is enough to learn 8 songs by heart to pass the course, and that isn’t what the module specification says, this is an error of Sam’s comment 12 type 2, just as if students don’t know the difference between the subjunctive and the dative this is an error and a teacher should correct them.

The problem arises if the students are signing up to learn guitar, and you are trying to revolutionise their whole lives as in Sam’s comment 25. But you have never offered this position, and I only attributed it to you via misunderstanding.

Steve@40. I’m not clear what I did to deserve that ad hominem. Whilst I am not an expert on medical ethics by any means, when I have been operated on in the past it has been with my consent. I have never argued that students are entitled to anything they want: clearly if I were to want accupuncture for a broken arm my surgeon might refuse to provide it. I have only argued that you cannot take my money for one service, whilst providing something different which I do not want. It would be unethical to agree to give me accupuncture, take my money for the procedure, and then do something else which I have never consented to.

If students want to use their higher education a a mere means to some other end you are more than welcome to refuse their money; but if you take the money you must provide the service requested and not some service which isn’t wanted and which, as Sam says in his comment 25, has radically different goals and outcomes. Higher Education can’t be likened to emergency medicine in which you have to operate without the patient’s consent.

I have only argued that you cannot take my money for one service, whilst providing something different which I do not want.

The problem here is again a word that’s doing too much work, in this case the word “service”. There are services- medicine and education are two- which are quite different from more “mundane” services in that the service provider is an expert and when I pay for that service I do so precisely for the purpose of placing myself in the hands of someone who, in a particular domain, understands my needs better than I do. (Yes, my consent is required; who here has advocated shanghaiing students into universities?) If a student enrolls in an educational institution when what s/he really wants is narrowly vocational training plus a certificate, the student has made an error, which is properly rectified, not by destroying all educational institutions and turning them into purveyors of what is done better by (in the US) community colleges and “career institutes”, but by the student leaving to seek a more appropriate service provider. And I do in fact hold the obvious corollary of this, that there are too many students attending traditional colleges and universities from which they are not equipped to benefit. (I of course must plead guilty to being able to hold this position, whose implications are admittedly rather callous with respect to the career prospects of academics, comfortably because I long since ceased to be one myself.)

I note as well that you continually draw back from the obvious implications of your stated position whenever challenged, as you did with respect to John’s #39. This is a sign of insufficiently thought-through ideas.

Andrew, till you agreed with John’s 39, I suspected you of trolling. I now think Steve (46) is right, you simply haven’t thought this through.

Let me ask how your revised

“The problem arises if the students are signing up to learn guitar, and you are trying to revolutionise their whole lives”

can in any way justify the kind of stuff to which Neville (1) is — I infer — subjected.

And let me object in the strongest possible terms to your

“but not on time which the students have paid for”

Would you give extra time to the overseas students admitted simply for financial reasons, who pay higher fees? (I’d give them equal time.) Would you give less time to students whose fees are waived? (I’d give them the same amount.)

Last, did students demand, e.g., course descriptions that include a section on Aims and a section on Objectives (etc.)?

@ Prof. Holbo:

Your discussion of x paper being better than y paper but not as good as z paper is (I assume) one of the typical, and traditional approaches to grading normatively. Which of course raises all sorts of difficult problems about the purposes/aims of education. Recognizing that, many have advocated a switch from norm referenced assessment to criterion reference. Of course, criterion referenced assessment is often guilty of the vagueness you describe in your “2 for clarity, 2 for organization” example you provide above.

But this need not be a fatal flaw– it merely requires a more specific and detailed list of criteria (what is counted as elements of clarity, etc.). Yes, this is difficult to do but it might go a long way to addressing the needs of students and the needs of institutions as well as a much better job of incorporating both examples 1 and 2 of the grading you discuss in the O.P.

#10 – Prof Weeden – is the first professor I have ever heard of who makes a genuine effort to grade fairly. At least this level of objectivity is absolutely required for any degree of reliability. If you believe that you can run through 200 essays over a period of a week, reading each one once, and rank them fairly, you are kidding yourself.

Any fair grading system would absolutely require at least the following:
1) a set of impartial standards, requiring scoring for different criteria and a weighting system for the importance of those criteria, devised at the time the test or essay is devised, that is applied rigorously to the results.
2) separate grading by two graders skilled in the field (not TA’s with a year of grad level course-work that is vaguely related to the course topic).
3) an initial read of the work to score by the criteria.
4) A review of all the papers to make sure that the scoring has been done consistently.
5) A tallying of scores, a ranking, and an assignment of grades based on the ranking.
6) A comparison of the two sets of grades and a re-grade in the event of discrepancies.
7) Random review of a certain number of papers by a third person to make sure the two graders are not both making the same errors in applying the criteria.

And none of this deals with an even more important issue, which is that grading as between different professors teaching similar material is wildly inconsistent. To deal with that, grading standards would have to be imposed at the departmental level. Tests and paper assignments would have to be vetted by committees, and grading by one professor would have to be reviewed by other professors.

Prof Weeden’s system, which she funds herself, apparently, is a giant step in the right direction, but it’s not nearly enough. For example, she checks only those papers that are a full letter grade apart. This practice has at least two flaws:
1) if the TA’s err consistently in the same direction (e.g. grading papers that show rhetorical skill higher than those that are substantively superior) Prof. Weeden will not detect it.
2) At most top-tier schools, the vast majority of papers are given A’s and B’s. Let’s be conservative and say that in Prof. Weeden’s classes all but a few failing papers are given A’s, B’s, or C’s. This means that effectively, there are 9 grades. A difference of a full letter grade (A- to B-) is a 1/3rd difference. So a discrepancy can be over 20% (e.g., A- to B, = 2/9 = .22) and Prof. Weeden won’t check it. Presumably she averages it – something she would never do, I would guess, if data for her own research revealed discrepancies of that magnitude. So, for example, one grader could be 20% harder than the other, or one could show wider variability than the other, and Prof. Weeden would trust in averaging to smooth out the discrepancies.

This isn’t at all to criticize Prof. Weeden, who does more than any professor I’ve ever heard of to be fair and consistent.

Universities are chock-full of people who know how to do study design in order to gather data fairly and how to aggregate, analyze, summarize, and interpret that data, but apparently none of that knowledge is ever applied to the major data-creation-and-analysis function of the university itself: grading.

Why not? I would give three reasons:
1) Doing it right would be ungodly expensive and time-consuming. It’s cheaper to do it wrong, and there’s no constituency to force you to do it right. The consumers of the data (grad schools and employers) apparently don’t care that the results are not reliable.
2) Doing it right would infringe on the autonomy of professors, who don’t want anyone else to tell them how to test and grade.

But students are well aware that the system is arbitrary. This is why they come to your door and whine and wheedle. It would be one thing if the grade had been assigned by a process that is transparent, objective, and reliable. But it wasn’t. So why shouldn’t they try to get a better grade?

Oh dear. You know, there are 3 kinds of people in the world – those who can count, and those who can’t.

I was incidentally reminded, by the OP, of an interview I did where my last question was, “What are you best at, what are your best skills?” and got the answer, “I’m best at everything,” which two or three follow-up questions couldn’t narrow down. So I’m willing to believe some students have room for improvement in the area of self-criticism.

I’ve graded a lot of papers, though surely not as many as John. Often, I write a lot of notes in the margins while I’m doing it, and underline things, and put little checks and the like. Normally, these are as much for me as for the student, so that I can remember what I thought was good, bad, confused, etc. about the paper. I then write a paragraph or so on the back trying to sum up the comments, say what was good or bad, and offering advice. This process has gotten easier in some ways by having students submit papers electronically and using the “comment” button from track changes- easier to read what I write and so on, and easier to change the comments afterwords to make them more useful for the student and not just me.

As for Bloix’s comment, I expect that time and money are the big factors preventing grading more like you’d like. Grading is extremely time consuming, if done right, as-is. Hiring more people to do it would be expensive. But, some approximations can be done. When I first was a TA, the professor for whom I graded had me give her some representative papers from various grade points, and she read them again and discussed them with me. It was very useful, and I learned a lot. When I’m grading, I usually assign a provisional grade, and then go back over the papers before assigning a final one to try to make sure I haven’t let me standards move around during the process. It’s not perfect, but it does help take out some variation.

#46- “I do so precisely for the purpose of placing myself in the hands of someone who, in a particular domain, understands my needs better than I do. ”

Does anyone believe that the average university professor understands the needs of students better than the students do? What training does a professor have in the needs of students? What incentive does a professor have to learn about the needs of students? Are professors hired, rewarded and retained for their ability to understand the needs of students?

Most professors’ understanding of students comes from their own experiences as students. But professors were unusual students – they were students who wanted to become expert in a field of academic study. Most students don’t want that: they want to enter some non-academic profession: business, industry, law, medicine, journalism, civil service, whatever.

But professors generally know very little about the world outside academia. They know how to be academic specialists and they know, more or less, how to teach others to become academic specialists.

Universities used to have core curricula. Those that still do – in the US, afaik, that means two, Reed College and Columbia University – can make a claim that they are teaching students general knowledge that they need to know as citizens of a democratic society. Those schools can say, we know the students’ needs better than they do. How a professor at any other school can make that claim is beyond my comprehension.

Bloix @ 62: As ignorant as the Professors are, do you really think 19 year old kids know better? How many have you talked to recently? And anyhow, it is not just professors but a set of professional educators who are theoretically shaping the experience students receive. The most well regarded universities most certainly have an opinion on matters and act on it. If they were all wrong, probably they would not be so highly regarded.

@46
Hopefully this is not too far offtopic for the post–I have nothing against the idea that a teacher is assumed to know where each student ought to go, but . . . What is the difference between “credentialing” and “education” in this case? Is “education” just “credentialing” with tacked-on courses in “philosophy of X” and “sociology of X”? Or is it the difference between being able to do a proof in geometry and being able to write a sentence defining “SAS” as a form of triangle congruence?

undergrads usually don’t even get their work back and nobody has time to read it anyway

I think this is not generally true in US universities. In big courses grad students, teaching assistants etc will read the papers, in small courses the instructors themselves will.

Re Andrew’s #67, in my previous, academic life I had opportunities to teach older returning students and found that, on average, their expectations were consistently better aligned with what a real institution of higher education has to offer than those of the typical 19 year old (not surprising, really, given their greater experience of life); and their motivation was correspondingly better. So the prevalence of such students doesn’t necessarily reinforce Andrew’s worldview.

#64- “As ignorant as the Professors are, do you really think 19 year old kids know better? How many have you talked to recently?”

I’m the father of two college students, who I talk to frequently – and to their friends, from time to time. Obviously they don’t know what they need, except that they do know they need a college degree in order to become adults. Among my kids and their friends and others of their social class, the only reason not to go to college is that you’re mentally or physically ill.

So what is it that they do need? Well, from my point of view, they need to learn to think rigorously, testing their ideas against serious criticism. They need to locate themselves and their society in the sweep of civilization. They need to learn to participate in the public civic debate in an informed way. And it would be nice if they developed some sort of aesthetic sense while they were at it.

What they often get is a narrow slice of an academic discipline based on what the professor is thinking about that year.

But oh dear, I didn’t mean to be hi-jacking this thread away from the point about comments and grading. I agree with just about everything Prof Holbo says, except for this:

“If they fail to provide a little self-criticism, they get skimpy comments.”

What you are doing here is devoting your time to those students who need your help the least.

In the Passover seder, there is the parable of the four children, from the wise, who asks a detailed question about the ins and outs of observance, down to the “one who does not even know how to ask.” Don’t ignore that one – that’s the student who needs you the most.

This fine piece by Stefan Collini in the LRB is relevant.

This semester I’m blessedly free of paper-reading (what I try to discipline myself to call it, rather than paper-grading) because I’m teaching only language courses. Fresh from Plato’s Apology, I would just comment that in addition to taking no fee for anything he did, Socrates claimed that he didn’t in fact teach, either. (Although in the Protagoras, he acknowledges that he rather does end up switching positions with Protagoras on the question of whether it’s possible to teach civic or moral excellence — but that’s the aporia into which that dialogue settles and, at any rate, not Socrates’ position on what it is that he does.)

This comments section could rapidly turn into a Graeber-esque discussion of moneticization and the imagination. And maybe it should. Certainly, I think, Socrates’ concerns about fees and whether teaching is possible can only be understood in the context of his society’s being in the midst of profound economic and other socio-political transitions. And some of the tensions in the comments here about the teacher’s relationship to the student (client?!!? please, spare me!) strike me as products of our confused consumerist-cum-democratic ways of thinking. (I include myself in that “our.”)

I’d just say that surely a teacher can — indeed, must — possess authority AND humbly practice listening.

As for me, the teacher is like the Iliadic hero in that (1) she teaches because she’s mortal and wants to do something that will in some sense make her immortal = something of larger social benefit, and (2) precisely because she is mortal, she also expects to be rewarded for her efforts, while she still lives, with at least enough to live on.

As for paper-reading and paper-grading (which I’ve been doing for 35 years now, often in very large courses), I have no simple formula. So much depends on the level and size of the course (and if you have TA help — something I’ve never had and always envied, though I know that coordinating TA’s is also a big job). Also, students’ collective needs shift and change over time. I have found that less may depend on the kinds of comment I provide on individual papers (though I am a great scribbler) than on the way I structure a course and how I integrate papers, of various types, into that structure. Last spring I taught a writing-intensive course to 19 students (so discussion-oriented) and assigned a series of graded “short analysis” papers on very narrow topics that required students to anaylze a text very closely. I was a bear about concise writing — slash marks everywhere. These assignments were interspersed with ungraded “response papers” on movies they watched for the course — opportunities to write however the hell they felt like writing, and for me to respond more personally, even whimsically. Finally, three 5-page essays on a topic each student had to devise (and get my approval, in an individual conference). Because of the short analysis papers, students understood the concise writing I expected on the 5-pagers as well as the kind of detailed textual analysis they should undertake. But I also expected each of them to come up with their questions to explore.

Next semester I’ll be teaching the same course to some 40 students (so more lecturing, less real discussion). No way I will be able to structure paper-writing assignments so artfully. But I like John’s idea of worrying less about justifying my grade in my comments and disciplining myself to identify one or a few things I can help each student with in his or her writing.

I would love to see examples of other people’s comments on papers. (1) and (2) are right.

The (3) you don’t add is that you are creating an intellectual dialogue with a student. This is why it is useful to assign papers early in the semester, in order to pull them into a private discussion with you and get them to see how their ideas can matter. I am realizing that I treat ungraded papers early on as if a student did a blog post, in fact–although I try to give better comments than you get on most blogs.

Like most people I hate to grade but unlike most people I actually enjoy writing comments on papers when I have very small classes or seminars (i.e., infrequently). If you make sure your students see you are engaging in an intellectual back and forth with them, you will get better papers–it’s also more fun for the professor.

I also agree with Bloix–You really can take the student who doesn’t know how to ask and get some discussion going on with them. It takes some creativity to do that–to take that tiny spark of originality and turn it into a fire. Also, it takes time a lot of us don’t have. The results can be very interesting. College students aren’t that different from kindergartners in that their view of what they can do is affected by what the professor thinks they can do. I sometimes act like they were giving me a well-thought out position even when they probably weren’t. ‘Oh THAT’S your view! But what about…??’ The next paper is always better (sometimes only marginally, but sometimes by alot.) I interpret lack of self-criticism very charitably in my comments (not in my grading)–it may make me a sap in most cases but I hope I catch those who genuinely need help.

This also leads me to 2* which is to get the student to see they may have done something worth doing even if they aren’t getting an A. Good comments reward their effort (a teeny bit).

That direct personal feedback is the best way to advance student learning is why we desperately need small classes in college–but that’s a different can of worms.

“I think this is not generally true in US universities. In big courses grad students, teaching assistants etc will read the papers, in small courses the instructors themselves will.”

Let me throw out a question here that I think is more than relevant to this thread: how long does it take an experienced instructor to quality-read and grade, with meaningful comments, a student paper? There’s plenty of expertise in this thread. I’m looking forward to your responses.

Andrew @67, Okay, I can see the argument for a significantly different structure of university when your students are much older. They probably are not signing up for an immersive 4 year experience and so it would make more sense to offer something slightly different and more sensitive to the likelihood that they are pursuing very specific and possibly narrow educational goals related to career needs they have identified. I don’t honestly know what the demographics of the average American university student look like, but I am thinking of your stereotypical big 4 year school bringing in 90% of it’s undergraduates directly from high school. And there I think it is clear that the school is going to be deciding what kind of experience students will have.

Responding to some other comments, I think it is possible and likely that the school will frequently get it wrong with poorly designed curriculum or stale subject matter. Not everything is perfect and certainly no general process is. I don’t think it would improve things in many cases to instead just do exactly what each student wants.

There is also at least one major flaw in Andrew’s argument and it has been bugging me since I first popped into this thread in the early AM. Just because you pay someone money does not make them your servant. “I am giving you money.” moves you nowhere in “you must do exactly as I wish now.” For instance, I don’t get to call up my phone company and demand that they send me a pizza pronto on the basis of our monetary pact. I cannot do that even if I think that phone service should include pizza to be decently called phone service. They offer a set of services and, if I pay them, I get those services. If I am not fond of how they provide those services, I can take my money and try to find another phone company that will deliver pizza, by God. But I don’t just get to insist that the phone company do what I demand because I paid good money for phone service. (Well, I can, but people will point in laugh.)

The educational institution offers an education. If students want mere credentialing, they can find an institution that offers such. Lord knows there are plenty. But a student’s money doesn’t make them king and their educators servants, just as it does not make the workers of a phone company, pizza parlour or other place of business servants.

I’m sorry but what is “fair” grading anyway? Bloix and others seem to think it should mean that there are “objective” criteria laid out beforehand that the students could – given time – check their own work against. This may work in calculus (we who teach math are lucky that way), but it cannot possibly be done in humanities, beyond some very basic, rough rules that are – as usual – proved by the exception.

As it happens, I teach math, in fact, just finished a night class in what’s called “Discrete Math”. Yes, it is easier to grade something like math or physics (or conversely, actually assigning grades for something that can’t meet some sort of objective criteria – even if it is subjectively graded – is just so many angels dancing on the head of a pin.) But even in math there is often a “right” way to go about solving a problem vs a “wrong” way, even if both ways give the correct answer. Iow, giving points for style is perfectly reasonable.

And let’s face it, most of the time there is a pretty good correlation between students who have mastered the mechanics of writing on a particular subject and how well they know it. Yes, I’m sure that there is an odd Beethoven or two who might not technically get a passing grade in a subject based on how well they’ve “demonstrated mastery of core concepts.” But they are very few and far between, and in any case, fairly recognizable.[1] The inarticulate oaf who is actually a sublime genius is only a little more common than hens teeth.

[1]That is to say, while “demonstrating mastery of core concepts” might be one way to earn a passing grade, few teachers are so straight-jacketed as to think that this is the only way to get a passing grade.

Bloix @ #54: I completely agree that my system isn’t perfect. I don’t always have a large enough pool of willing grad students who study inequality to hire as graders, although I do always hire advanced grad students. (I have input on the TA, but I don’t choose him/her.) And, yes, I could trigger triple-grading with a lower tolerance for grade discrepancy. Some years I have.

But there are diminishing returns, both to the students in the aggregate — they get better lectures if I spend fewer hours grading — and to me professionally. As you note, getting my students’ grades absolutely perfect does not help at all at promotion time. It’s also not why I went to grad school, took a job in an R1, and write grant proposals (some of which fund hands-on training for undergraduates).

I didn’t mention this in my first comment, but one of the reasons why I let students drop one of the four exams also has to do with equity, indirectly. In a large class, the odds are that some students will genuinely fall ill, experience a family emergency, observe a religious holiday that falls on or adjacent to an exam day, or be overwhelmed to the point of doing themselves harm (sadly, I’m not exaggerating).

It seems inhuman not to make some allowances, and it seems unfair to only give dispensation to students who ask for it. After all, we know that some students come to college with much more experience, and cultural capital suited for, negotiating with educational authorities to get what they want or need. See, e.g., Annette Lareau’s work on class differences in same.

(Now that I think about it, my concern with creating equitable grading structures is part occupational hazard. I can’t turn down a request to answer a survey, either; market researchers have me on speed dial. And occupational brainwashing is evidently permanent, because I still overtip wait staff.)

I’m sorry to have to tell you, but there’s a right and good way to machine a part or tune an engine, and a wrong or bad way. And people who go to trade schools get shouted at very loudly when they insist that, as they paid, they have a right to do it how they like. Or even, in their first year or so, to waste people’s time arguing about it.

On “objective” criteria, I’m with John Holbo. I spent time in a bureaucracy watching supposedly unfair or opaque “subjective” judgements be replaced with “objective” check lists, formal criteria (with more sub points each year) and so on. All it did was either provide an impenetrable cover for unfairness or allow the stupid or lazy a way to justify the wrong decision. Oh, and sometimes good people made the wrong decision because, you know, the objective criteria came out that way, even though their subjective judgement was screaming “wrong, wrong!”.

One driver is the hubristic belief that we can make explicit and codify precisely all the factors that go into complex judgements. I can see the next stage – “yes, we know you can hit the ball, Miss Williams, but we can’t qualify you unless you can tell us exactly how you plan to hit a fast left hand return over the net. We have to have objectivity and transparency in tennis – the fans have paid to watch, after all”.

It’s scary to read John Holbo@26, that UK matrix. Similar projects are afoot in the US, as my husband can attest (he teaches at a state college — public institutions get much more hung up on this stuff than private colleges like my own do, though we fret about “grade inflation”). But still, nothing so rigidly bureaucratic as that (easily manipulated) matrix.
I love the way verbs for teaching in Latin and Greek take two accusatives. Less clear in English what’s up grammatically, and maybe conceptually. Does agent deliver object to indirect object? It shouldn’t, and can’t, really work that way.
Teachers should be agents who disappear in the transaction between material/skills and the next generation. Between past and future. But they are crucial nonetheless. (Sort of like money.)

But as a practical matter, requiring criterion-based grading does nothing to improve the quality of grading. Because, as pointed out above, it is trivial to circumvent the system, consciously or subconsciously. Besides requiring instructors to be angels, what practical means can be used to require thoughtful and accurate grading?

SoV

Agreed, but if you’re not careful it can be equally arbitrary in the sciences. Although the distinction between correct and incorrect is clearer, the design (or lack thereof) of the grading rubric can completely undermine that kind of certainty. It’s better, but not categorically so.

Fascinating discussion, and I’m sorry to have to dip in and out every twenty-four hours or so rather than participate properly. There’s a risk, therefore, that this comment simply repeats points made earlier, and at any rate that it’s out of place in the discussion, but I don’t think it’s been put in quite these terms…

Instrumentality v. idealism in education; largely in response to various of Andrew Fisher’s comments and responses to them. The formal position is that I am employed to teach my subject to students who have sworn blind on their application forms that they wish to study this subject as an end in itself. In theory, therefore, I could teach them – in curriculum design and content, assessment, feedback etc. – as if they were all going to become academic specialists in this subject. However, I know perfectly well that most if not all of them will not become academics and don’t wish to anyway, that some of them are simply interested in getting the qualification and regard the subject itself as a more or less pleasant and interesting means to that end, and that most of them are juggling, more or less unconsciously, instrumentalist concerns about the need to get ‘their’ 2.1 degree and a genuine interest in the subject. I therefore tailor both course structure and feedback to acknowledge this fact. I do believe that as a result of studying Roman economic history my students are given a valuable training in research skills, critical analysis, construction of arguments, presentation skills etc. – but I don’t agree that I should not try to teach anything more than those practical, ‘transferable’ skills, let alone that I should organise everything around getting the students to pass the qualification regardless of their actual grasp of the subject, even if I suspect that for some of them this is their main if not sole motivation. After all, they could have gone elsewhere to do a different subject; if they’ve chosen to add the lustre of my sort of institution to their qualification, they have to accept the constraints of how the subject gets taught at such an institution.

The imposition of external constraints and guidelines is a slightly different matter. I’ll concede Andrew’s point that some academics previously gave only subject-specific feedback, and that it is a good thing that students should receive feedback that’s actually useful to them in a range of ways. My personal experience is that it’s unhelpfully formalised and restrictive; I’d be giving this sort of feedback anyway, but now I have to do it in specific ways according to specific formulae – and I entirely agree with John Holba at #26 and #96 about the logical incoherence of a lot of this stuff.

Further, for all that many of my students do clearly have a somewhat instrumentalist view of the purpose of their studies, the real pressure to turn all degree programmes into vocational training courses has come from elsewhere, above all government and various quangos. Virtually all my students do have a genuine interest in the subject, and are thoroughly bemused by all the obsession with transferable skills, specification of learning outcomes and the like; they may be orientated towards getting the qualification at the end, but they are happy with the idea that they’ll get it by doing well in their subject. To an alarming degree, we in the UK are now effectively training our students to think in these terms because of the ways in which we have been required to describe and organise our programmes.

Bloix, 93

of course you’re right. The answer’s the old UK system, still, presumably, largely existence, of blind double marking and external examiners, and examiners’ meetings to review marks. But I doubt very much Sam — for example — objects to that system.

Neville, yes. Quite.

Andrew, yes there are academics whose view of “good” and “bad” students disadvantage some, well, good students! And yes — though you didn’t quite say this — an overemphasis in university admissions on A Level results will further entrench social and economic and racial inequality. But your hyperbole and your support of mindless bureaucratic “feedback” mechanisms, and “never mind the quality, weigh the paperwork” assessment, hamper understanding of your true cause.

Bloix (93)> You don’t seem to have much of an idea about how grading can work (in my case DOES work). I teach at a small university in the US. I am the only one in my field in my department (English), so in that sense, I’m the only one to say what is right or wrong about, say, the Wife of Bath. There is a historian in my area, but not anyone else in the English Dept. That said, we DO discuss how we grade. We sit around every year at the end of the year, for our assessment, and choose about 30 random essays from across the second-semester composition classes, and we do “grade norming.” We grade them, talk about our grades, discuss outliers (if most folks gave it a “c” why did I give it an “A” and bob over there give it an “f’?). There are surprisingly few outliers, and usually they can be explained by differeing views of standards. Once we’ve “normed” we grade pretty similarly. So, a paper will get an average of a B, let’s say. Some folks will give a B+, some may go as low as a C, but we are in the same range. As far as I know, this process is fairly normal. SO, one doesn’t usually go 30 years without having any idea if they are grading “wrong” or not.

I, for one, was questioned about my grades by my school Dean and department chair because they felt my grades in composition classes (and perhaps overall) were a little on the high side.

And I can’t grade all the papers three times. With at least four classes each semester, and at least 70 students, (40 of which are in composition), that is impossible. That said, I grade a group before putting grades on them. I read them, comment, and consider what I’ve got in terms of papers, standards, etc. If I see a clear misunderstanding, that is, the same mistake over and over that is likely to be my fault, I consider it when giving grades.

We also have departmental definitions of what makes an “A” paper, etc. that are (pretty much) departmentally agreed upon AND available to our students–they are part of the handbook students get at the beginning of the year, and I go over them in class.

So, grades are not entirely arbitrary. I will say that they aren’t entirely uniform, either, of course. They do vary based on professors, just as content varies some, too.

And, I try to do what you want for your kids: teach them the skills–critical thinking skills–that will serve them regardless of their majors, careers, etc. The truth is, it’s the hardest skill to learn, and often the one that is the least immediately reconizable. As a post said above, students sometimes come back later and say “now I get what you were trying to show me then…”

(FWIW my undergraduate experience in almost all my philosophy and other humanities courses, 25 years ago, was excellent, as were almost all the grad school courses I took later in history and history of science. But most of the professors tended to the minimal comment school in most cases.)

@106 Bianca’s comment has me completely baffled. Does someone actually believe this is the way it works? I remember getting papers back as an undergraduate- “this paragraph is good, why can’t all of your writing be this clear and concise”. And I’m thinking: “I know, I know, but how!”

Is it really that hard to see why, when I grade essays, there is a certain amount of qualitative squishiness to the assessment process, whereas when I write an mcq-style final exam I can not just say what the right answer is but actually program a machine to grade the tests!

Well that’s certainly not what you’ve been saying. It’s more like this:

Perhaps the problem is this: you are inferring from the fact that I say I have trouble explaining to students why they got the grade they got that I myself don’t feel I know why I am giving the grades I give. So therefore the grade is ‘changeable’, you infer. I feel a deep B-ish feeling welling up in me when I read x, so the student gets a B.

Yes, that’s exactly what you and others have been saying. Look up at the discussion where people are saying the time of day the paper is being read can effect the final grade, or the discussion where what might be a “C” one day could morph into a “B” next week.

If you disagree with those sentiments, now it the time to do so. But I think that here is the real nub:

This sort of sentence-by-sentence trench warfare is nothing you can wage across a whole 5-page paper. I’m not made of time, you know. But, often, there is no way to make the student see what you mean except to get nitpicky about some little bit. But then you end up not really providing ‘general comments’.

My jaw just hit the floor with that one. John, none of us our made out of time. But we’re paid to do our jobs, and grading and evaluating our students in a way that gives them relevant feedback is part of that job. I grade something like 1,000 to 2,000 problems each week. I spend a lot of time outside of the official workday grading each and every one of these problems, and doing so in that picky line-by-line detail that you just don’t have the time for. In fact, that’s the first activity that comes to mind when opponents of public schooling cite the easy hours and long vacations that teachers get as justification for cutting their already less-than-generous pay.

My point is that it’s important to say what you think will help the student see what went wrong.

Well, on that part we’re agreed. As I said earlier, maybe this is one of the reasons the sciences get more respect than the humanities; I don’t know a single math or physics guy who doesn’t put in long hours grading in that picky line by line fashion that you don’t have time for. Very, very few of my students have ever expressed dissatisfaction in what I’ve marked wrong in their work (how much I take off for those mistakes is a different story.)

It’s comments like yours that make me realize all of a sudden why some people might hold the teaching profession in rather low regard. I’m still blinking in amazement that you would say such a thing.

This doesn’t hold in the hard sciences, of course, where you can apply a rubric with some sort of objectivity and a lot of effort.

However, the issue of inconsistency in grading between professors remains. And it’s not a simple issue since it’s affected both by the type / difficulty of exam questions and by each professor’s individual notion of what a reasonable grade distribution looks like. Speaking as a scientist myself, I think the self-righteousness in your last couple of comments is a wee bit over the top.

However, the issue of inconsistency in grading between professors remains.

True. But I was addressing Holbo’s claim about what he thought people were saying as opposed to what they were actually saying, so that’s a different issue.

And it’s not a simple issue since it’s affected both by the type / difficulty of exam questions and by each professor’s individual notion of what a reasonable grade distribution looks like. Speaking as a scientist myself, I think the self-righteousness in your last couple of comments is a wee bit over the top.

Unless the class being offered is a first- or second-time offering, the grade distribution is what it is. And um, . . . I certainly don’t see any self-righteousness being expressed. Look again. What I am saying is that the students I’m familiar with – even the artsy types who have no use for math or science – certainly respect the science-types more, even if they don’t like them. Otoh, I hear a lot of talk about sucking up to certain humanities professors just because they have some idea of how arbitrary the grading is.

And I’m sorry, but when I hear some prof say they just don’t have the time to really grade in a manner that is transparent, objective, and gives good feedback, it’s kind of difficult for me to defend them from the public-school-is-evil-and-ineffective-and-teachers-are-featherbedding-incompetents pro-voucher types.

Yes, grading and giving good feedback is hard. It’s also what we get paid for. Deal with it.

SoV,

As someone who spent some philosophy grad school time grading essays and a lot of high school math teacher time grading tests by hand (so as to give partial credit and better commentary that students can use to improve their thinking about math), I think the distinction between hard and soft science grading is being overstated in your comments. I know that I have to double check my early grades against my later grades when doing tests because I tend to understand what mistakes my students are making and why they are making them better (and thus become more generous) the more I work through papers. I have various mechanisms I use to help ensure more accurate and consistent grading occurs, but they are very similar to the type of steps I took as a grad student to make sure that I wasn’t letting my expectations fall off as I was increasingly worn down by common mistakes.

The interesting thing is that rubrics tend to make the grading unfair in a different way. I used to teach AP Calc and in prepping kids for the written response portion of the exams, I got very good at training them to show off any little bit of info they had by manipulating the way that we knew the grading rubrics were used. It ends up creating a situation where those who are savvy about test taking and gaming the system do much better than those who aren’t with very little respect to their actual mathematical knowledge or ability.

All of which is to say, as a math teacher, I think that teachers of math and other hard sciences often overestimate just how objective and fair their assessment is as compared to the soft sciences.

All of which is to say, as a math teacher, I think that teachers of math and other hard sciences often overestimate just how objective and fair their assessment is as compared to the soft sciences.

That’s a fair cop, Guv :-) But I think – speaking as one math teacher to another – that you really do go through each and every problem line by line, right? And that you grade everyone’s problem number one first before proceeding to everyone’s problem number two just so you can go back and correct any deficiencies in your grading – maybe you realize after the same wrong answer five times in a row that you’ve asked an ambiguous question, say, or there’s a typo on the exam that you missed.

This seems to be a standard part of good practices everywhere I’ve worked, so I’m guessing that what I’m outlining is no surprise to you, and in fact by far the norm rather than the exception.

All I can say is that in my experience when such discrepancies arise – and yes, of course they do, it would be silly of me to deny it – people certainly hear about it. Especially if it’s your 2). That’s way not cool. And that’s apparently the difference between the sciences and the humanities, to judge from this isolated discussion.

This is simply not true at the large state university my daughter (an engineering major) attends.

And I must once more point out that you haven’t exactly documented this triumphalism. If it’s there, quote it.

I did quote a typical example, above.

But I think – speaking as one math teacher to another – that you really do go through each and every problem line by line, right? And that you grade everyone’s problem number one first before proceeding to everyone’s problem number two just so you can go back and correct any deficiencies in your grading – maybe you realize after the same wrong answer five times in a row that you’ve asked an ambiguous question, say, or there’s a typo on the exam that you missed.

It is indeed. It was also pretty common practice when I was grading essays. In fact, based only on my purely anecdotal observations, I would say it was more prevalent among the philosophy graders than among my fellow math teachers because the math teachers assume objectivity that just isn’t there.

Apologies if I’m repeating something that was said up-thread… that’s 120 longgg comments.

Having students do peer assessments has seemed to me a useful way to accomplish “1”. It’s hard to actually give an analytic account of why a paper gets a certain grade (although I do show them a rubric which I use as a heuristic). But if they’re forced to think critically about a peer’s paper, they grades they give are uncannily close to the grades I give, and they have a much stronger grasp of what kind of judgment went into evaluating their own paper. Then my written comments can focus on something important.

Just to point out that John is right about discursive essays: unit by unit, they take much longer to read and comment on than do things like problem sets, if I may compare the latter to correcting homework assignments, daily quizzes and tests in lower and intermediate level foreign language classes. They just do. One (among many reasons): each essay has its own voice, its own distinctive approach, and perhaps its own distinctive mode of argumentation, and as its reader you have to orient yourself to all those things before you can even begin to evaluate how successful the essay is or how it may have failed in its own purposes. Even the five-paragraph “canned essay” leaves infinite room for legitimate variety in all these areas. Once you think you understand what the writer is trying to achieve, it can still be very difficult to identify precisely what she needs to do to improve, and you may need to read several different essays by the same student to discern the habits of constructing sentences or organizing paragraphs that she needs to modify, in accordance with her very individual voice and mode of thinking.
It’s often more useful to the student to isolate, say, just one sequence of sentences or one paragraph, and to go over the problems there exhaustively. A paper with a million things marked up is just dismaying to the student. Meeting with a student about a paper — especially if you’ve already met with them as they were preparing to write it — is also hugely valuable. For one thing, by that time they’ve gained some distance from what they’ve written and
One thing that hasn’t come up here: revising/rewriting. We all do that with anything serious we’re working on, usually after having gotten feedback from colleagues (and then again from readers and an editor). Having students revise an essay may be the most effective tool at our disposal for guiding them in improving their writing. The main reason we don’t do more of it, I think, is time — students’ time spent rewriting and our own time spent rereading, when time is needed for giving full attention to the next portion of the course. One reason advanced seminars in the major or senior theses can be so valuable to students is that these are the contexts in which rewriting and revising can (or, in the case of theses, must) be built in.

Also, remind yourself how some of the “grades” that really count are made – GRE and the like: Computer algorithms plus some essay grading by lowly paid students, resulting in scores that are known to correlate with essay length. Those scores are far more relevant in terms of career impact than whatever you all are doing.

SoV:

You might find this radio program of some interest:

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/

Scent, I’m confused. You’ve convinced me (in #133) that, in your Discrete Math class, you can give exams that are objective and easy to grade fairly. But the exams I give (I teach in a US law school) are not objective, and are much more difficult to grade fairly. Further, I could not give an objective exam and still capture the things I’m looking for. I think you get this. What I don’t understand is [1] why you think it’s “weird” (#95) that people who give exams that are hard to grade objectively, have a harder time grading them than do people who give exams that are easy to grade objectively; and [2] why you’re convinced that people who give exams that are hard to grade objectively, work less hard at grading than you do. We face real challenges in grading stemming from the nature of our disciplines (challenges, as you point out, that you don’t face). We acknowledge those challenges. That doesn’t mean that we work less hard than you do. Some of us do, I expect, and some of us don’t (the world is like that). I’ve surely got no reason to believe that Holbo does.

Piglet @ 129 gives me heart that my university and I may actually be quite forward-thinking in our assessment practices. I haven’t accepted an assignment in hard copy for years (apart from final exams, on which no feedback is given) and all assignment comments are made using the wonders of modern technology such as Microsoft Word.

John your opening statement was reminiscent of what so many business students say, especially MBA students: ‘I’ve been managing people half my life, so I think I know a thing or two about how it should go.’ The inference is that people who actually study management, viz academics, have nothing valuable to impart. The thread here has been notably lacking input from teaching and learning scholars. I’m not one, but as a professional teacher I try to stay abreast of teaching and learning scholarship, and there are sound reasons why the subjective, I-know-a-good-essay-when-I-see-it approach has been thoroughly discredited.

A well-designed rubric (which will look nothing like the illustration #26 but will have extensive criteria directed at the specific learning objectives of the assessment task) makes function 1 in the OP comparatively straightforward and takes little time to apply. It does however take quite a lot of time and effort to design in the first place, mainly because it forces academics to think through exactly what learning objectives they want to assess and what evidence they will use to make their evaluation. To say “Oh that’s just too hard and academics won’t/can’t do it” is simply a judgement of widespread professional incompetence, which may be accurate in some places but not in my experience. The objections to rubrics that I have observed are usually nothing more than the usual resistance to change, coupled with a resentful feeling that they are somehow undermining the status (and power?) of the professor.

Much of the thread implies an either/or outcome, as if giving students a comprehensive explanation of the basis of their mark precludes ‘communicating something significant that will teach the student to be a better writer/thinker’. Using rubrics makes the first task quite fast, as per #115. The latter kind of feedback can be tailored to meet the needs of individual students provided proper learning resources have been provided in the first place. For example, ‘you should download the advice on report writing from [URL] and consult it frequently next time you have to write this kind of assignment’, or ‘you have misunderstood the nature of path/goal theory – I suggest you watch the recorded lecture again starting about 30 minutes in, or read the textbook pp x-y’. Of course many (most) students will ignore this kind of advice but it doesn’t take long to write. Those who sincerely wish to learn will benefit.

Finally, what happened to asking a student to drop by for a chat or give you a call? Interactive feedback is often more effective than anything you can write, and it lets students who want this kind of help self-select. At least at my institution, students enrol with very diverse aspirations and expectations. Trying to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment comments is simply not appropriate.

John I think some of the disagreement in a very fascinating thread arises from the fact that people are coming to the discussion from different disciplinary backgrounds, and therefore conceptualise the purpose of assessment differently. However there is no reason why rubrics cannot be designed to cover multiple approaches to a topic. Always the test is what learning outcomes are we trying to assess? What evidence will we use to evaluate the extent to which students have achieved them? If we are clear about these things we ought to be able to express them systematically. If we can’t answer the questions then it suggests either the assessment task or the course objectives have been poorly designed.

I agree that rubrics cannot guarantee consistency but they are very useful in moderating assessment amongst a team of graders. If academics are giving different grades it means there are inconsistencies in the way they are interpreting the marking criteria, and the rubric then becomes the agenda for finding out where the differences are arising. This still involves a considerable amount of time and discussion, and there’s still plenty of scope for problems to arise, but at least it avoids long aimless debates about the purpose of the assessment task.

The discussion is something of an pointless exercise for business schools – if they want international accreditation, which most do, they have no choice. They will have to use rubrics, not only for individual assessment tasks but also to link to overall program learning outcomes and graduate attributes. I certainly agree that we should always try to go beyond this and give feedback that will help individual students learn to do better, while acknowledging that many students don’t want this kind of advice and it’s not our role to try to persuade them to change.

Could I ask: when we create assignments beyond the daily reading/study preparation for class, are we assigning essays, problem sets, tests (and so forth) in order to be able to give grades at the end of the course? Or to promote students’ learning? I realize that the latter goal, which I take to be THE goal (with grades almost an incidental product), has somehow been lost in much of this discussion.

Of course we’ll all say (and mean it) that it’s to promote student learning. My kin around the table when we meet on certain occasions are somewhat taken aback when I say I’m relatively uninterested about what students get right. Well, of course I am; once they’ve learned the material to my satisfaction, my job is done and they get handed off to the next set of guys on the education treadmill.

What I am much more interested in, what is really my bread and butter, is what my students get wrong, and why. Over the years I’ve found it’s not so much that my kids aren’t learning as much as their “mislearning”. Accordingly, exams, homework, etc. are diagnostic tools. A right answer is a right answer, mostly. But there are many ways to go wrong. Spotting a pattern in the way wrong answers accumulate actually tells me something about what’s been “mislearned”.

Another example: a mistake some students make is the improper multiplication of integrals. They think that because you can freely pull out sums from under an integral and integrate them separately that you can do the same thing for products. Well, you can, sometimes.

Now, you’d think that this would be easily corrected but once I cogged onto it, something much interesting was happening: turns out that a lot of these students had the wrong idea of what it meant for a function or an operation to be what we in the biz call “linear”. Catch that error, correct them on it, and it’s amazing how your exasperation at these rumdums who just couldn’t get it and were guessing apparently at random changes into “Gee, I really should make sure before we do differentiation and integration that all of my students really know what the term linear means.”

I guess this is my long-winded way of saying that not everyone regards quizzes, essays, exams etc as primarily a diagnostic tool.

Ken: “there is no reason why rubrics cannot be designed to cover multiple approaches to a topic. Always the test is what learning outcomes are we trying to assess?”

Allowing multiple approaches in some cases means that different students are pursuing different learning outcomes, right? If Sammy wants to try to develop a novel, plausible, and charitable interpretation of an argument in such-and-such work of philosophy, and Susie wants to try to refute that argument, understood according to the standard interpretation of it, then there isn’t one learning outcome that we’re trying to assess by means of the paper.

Now, you can just make your rubric more complicated, of course, by including a lot of disjunctive criteria. But then you might decide that the maximum points limit in one line of the rubric is just right for the refutation project but not for the interpretive project. So then you discover you need to make the rubric flexible–2 points or so for this–or you need two different rubrics. But then Joan comes in, and she has an interesting plan to contextualize the argument by comparing and contrasting it with one found in a little-known earlier work philosopher so-and-so would have known. So then you need a third rubric. And a fourth and a fifth. But finally everyone has their plan approved, and you have your five rubrics (or one really, really complicated one) ready to go on the due date of the paper, only to discover that Joan and Sammy wound up radically changing their plans in the days before the due date, but wrote very carefully prepared papers of yet unconsidered types nonetheless, so your set of rubrics is now inadequate. You can make more. Or you can refuse to accept Joan and Sammy’s papers, and vow to make many more rules about what the paper has to be like in future.

Or you could quit with the rubrics. They’re useful aids to objectivity, and they’re sometimes aids to efficiency, but they aren’t always worth the cost in time you could spend . . . giving students helpful feedback on their work. And not of the “reread such-and-such pages” sort, but comments that are much deeper–comments that help students see what a smart, skeptical reader is thinking as she tries to work through some important part of the paper’s argumentative or interpretive or contextualizing project (or whatever else the student comes up with).

Zehou it sounds to me like the learning outcomes you want to assess are (1) depth of understanding of a text, and (2) the capacity to develop a coherent argument about it. A single well-designed rubric can be used as a framework for assessing those; there is no need to design multiple rubrics just because students will adopt different approaches to the assessment task. Most of my assessment tasks are designed to test students’ understanding of theory and capacity to critically evaluate it, and it’s not terribly hard to design an appropriate rubric.

Like I said before, these are issues that have been extensively researched by teaching and learning scholars and there is a huge amount of published material available. It’s a bit disconcerting to read so many people trying to make a case from personal experience, as if the body if existing knowledge doesn’t exist or isn’t worth consulting.

Ken: “it sounds to me like the learning outcomes you want to assess are (1) depth of understanding of a text, and (2) the capacity to develop a coherent argument about it.”

It makes sense to assess the one paper for “depth of understanding of a text,” but not the other one, since the other one doesn’t aim at deep understanding of a text, but rather at refuting an interesting and important argument (largely) assumed to be the one in the text. So there’s no deep understanding on display, but something else useful and relevant to the course gets done. And you can’t assess the interpretive project for not offering and defending a verdict about the success of the argument, since offering and defending such a verdict was no part of the student’s project, though something else useful gets done.

Of course, you can just vow never to allow multiple approaches in this way, and thereby ensure that you can stick with one, tidy rubric for a writing assignment that has a lot of constraints. I’m not saying that is or isn’t the right way to go. But you were telling John that he wouldn’t have to give up allowing multiple approaches. I thought that sounded like telling him he can have his cake and eat it too. Hence the examples.

Mark & be Damned.

Know it.

Do your best.

Forget yourself, not the subject.

Help others.

& Fail.

The word “objective” is getting a lot of exercise here. It seems mostly to be used to mean “impartial”, but the use allows the overtone of “invariantly true – regardless of observer” to creep in. I think it was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who observed – following on from Aristotle – that all bodies of learning are crafts, with standards of procedure, correctness etc set by the current practitioners, and the aim of learning is to show someone how to be a practitioner – and thereby earn the right to participate in and influence the ongoing evolution of the standards.

This makes judgements on student progress less “objective” than “intersubjective”, and allows (indeed demands) a certain amount of variation in views on standards etc. These may be indicative not of inexcusable sloppiness but of a field that is intellectually alive.

Ken: “by the end of the teaching period they [all of a course’s learning outcomes] should all have been assessed.”

I don’t think I denied this, nor does anything I said rule out endorsing it, right? We’re talking about a particular paper assignment, where we needn’t assume it is the only thing students are required to do in the course.

“IMHO good teaching starts with learning outcomes and works backwards. There may be courses where the learning outcomes are malleable and subject to change as the teaching period progresses but I suggest they are a tiny minority and can be disregarded for the purposes of the general argument. Hard cases make bad law.”

I don’t remember saying anything about the learning outcomes for the course being malleable. We were talking about a particular paper assignment, right?

In any case, what you say here is exactly what I was trying to get you to admit: it’s not ok to allow multiple approaches, after all, according to you, since that makes the instructor’s job of assessment too hard.

Meredith @ 151
Why is this numbers-based, objective approach associated with business more than, say, science and so-called “liberal hubris”? Or is it? (Among managers outside academia who’re subjected to something similar, it is frequently seen the opposite way, and it seems peculiar that something originating largely in universities themselves is rejected out of hand by academics as alien in that way.)

(As for the Delphic oracle thing, there’s a comment on a philosophy paper–an exam, though, not an essay–that I’m still wondering about the meaning of. Did it say, “i can’t fault this answer for what it is but you aren’t cut out for further work in philosophy,” or did it say, “interesting but could be better”? No I’m not hoping John will interpret it for me, just a data point.)

bianca steele, Of course I have no problem with numerical or statistical measurements when they actually are measuring something, and something of use to be measured, and when they are interpreted intelligently (e.g., in concert with other information and with due caution about the reliability of the measuring instruments themselves). But not everything can be evaluated/understood well, or if well then sufficiently or efficiently, through numerical measures. Seems pretty obvious to me, and not just when I’m reading students’ papers. I spent a good deal of the last four-six weeks reporting on assistant professors’ teaching, basing my analyses on the results of student course surveys (lots of numbers, percentage groups — with huge standard mean deviations, btw, even in large courses — and several poorly worded questions), reports on class visits made by tenured professors, interviews we conducted with students, and discussions about all these things with my tenured colleagues. I found all these instruments of evaluation useful, when put into conversation with one another. In writing the final reports, though, I had to keep in mind that the faculty committee reading them would look at the student course evaluations (some nice graphs that make the “bottom line” on key questions easy to take in at a glance) before even reading my reports and might already have latched on to the “numbers” in those surveys as somehow “the real story.” Not because these faculty don’t trust my judgment or my departmental colleagues’, but because of a naive reflex, to which most of us are prone, to accept numbers or graphs as somehow being “objective” and more accurate or useful than other modes of analysis.
My guess, for what it’s worth, is that business probably uses numbers to measure things like sales and labor costs well, but that they may waste a lot of time, energy and money devising various schemes for improving sales or office efficiency or whatever through their misuse of numbers and statistics. I’m pretty sure that the decisions made by successful upper management on big questions involve many judgments that aren’t driven directly by numbers but by shrewd anaylsis of many factors and by, well, vision. Steve Jobs went to Reed, right?

Meredith, I had in mind, actually, not sales and accounting, but areas that are more qualitative or based in the physical world (especially engineering and manufacturing): new numerical measures and rules for monitoring performance and process, usually imposed from the outside by paid consultants (either because management wants to use a new technique, or because government and industry bodies impose those measures) who are trained to get companies up to speed with the requirements of what is unfortunately often just the next new thing, or sometimes from within large organizations by internal specialists.

For example, there is a good body of evidence that in developing new software, the number of bugs found tracks a curve of a certain shape. There is also a good body of evidence that the specifics of the curve vary greatly. The average of one important number, across every project ever studied, ever, in the history of computers, which I’ll call B, is IIRC 8. It makes perfect sense to track the value of B for the group, and to see where they are on the curve; it is less than helpful to mandate they will hit B=8. It makes even less sense to miscalculate B because a manager believes to calculate the number differently will make people work harder.

John I’m not sure if you are deliberately missing the point or if I am expressing myself badly. You do seem to be responding to individual points out of context instead of trying to understand my whole argument.

Of course I don’t try to write marking criteria for an assessment task like an essay that assumes there is ‘a narrowly prescribed right answer’. That would utterly frustrate the whole aim of encouraging students to engage critically with the course content. The rubric would cover firstly depth of understanding of the relevant course content, and secondly the ability to develop a coherent argument that responds to whatever question you asked. I am not interested in whether they give the ‘correct answer’ (because there isn’t one) but in whether they are able to use evidence and logic to make a persuasive argument. That’s what I incorporate in the rubric.

In a math assignment you DO want the ‘correct’ answers, but the principle is the same – first you work out the purpose of the assignment and then you work out what evidence you will rely on to evaluate whether students have achieved the objective/s. You seem to be assuming rubrics have to be inflexible things that have a checklist of acceptable answers; that’s simply not correct. If you want to know whether students know legal principles, you use a quantitative correct/incorrect approach; if you want to know whether students can write creative verse you use a qualitative approach. Either way you are forced to explain exactly what purpose the assignment is serving and what evidence you are going to take into account in awarding a mark, which is (1) good discipline for the academic; (2) valuable guidance for students, and (3) ethically highly desirable to promote fairness and transparency in assessment.

There seems to be an assumption in a lot of the comments that rubrics are some kind of numerical or quantitative tool. There is nothing inherently quantitative about them, nor do I use them that way. They are flexible tools, which have plenty of difficulties associated with them, but if used properly they should produce superior results to alternatives such as norm-referenced assessment. This is really so well-accepted now in teaching and learning scholarship that I’m surprised to see them so vigorously attacked here. Especially when, if used effectively, they free up some time to give the kind of constructive advice to students that everyone from the OP on agrees is an important part of learning.

John you are clearly now aggressively supporting a position, rather than engaging in a discussion; your prerogative of course (your blog etc) but also the reason I rarely bother to comment on blogs these days. Combativeness for its own sake gets tiresome after a while.

To anyone who would like to explore the issues in greater depth than can be done in a comments thread I commend Jonsson, A & Svingby, G (2007), ‘The use of scoring rubrics: Reliability, validity and educational consequences’, Educational Research Review, 2, 2, pp 130-144. Those who have time might also like to read Stevens, D & Levi, A (2005), ‘Introduction to rubrics’, with the caveat that it is an unapologetic argument in favour of rubrics and needs to be balanced by consulting other literature, of which there is an ample supply (contrary to what one might think from reading this thread, assessment in higher education is not exactly a virgin field of research). Rubrics, or assessment based on criteria and standards to use a more cumbersome but informative term, are not a cure for all the problems ailing assessment in higher education, but an approach that when properly implemented overcomes some of the deficiencies of more traditional, holistic grading systems.

Two things:

1. CT should change the coding so that post numbers never change as posts are injected further up after moderation. Let the post moderation posts get unique, suffixed numbers (“#54a” instead of taking “#54” from some other post. Isn’t there some technical way to do that?

2. abstract argumentation might not be very effective on this topic. How about John H provides a sample question and sample paper and let Scent of Violet grade it and time that grading. The rest of us can the grade THAT grading performance.

Meredith, I meant both numeric and qualitative evaluations, which are imposed by the same sorts of consultants, trained in the same way.

Also, Peter W. @ 156: I think it was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who observed – following on from Aristotle – that all bodies of learning are crafts, with standards of procedure, correctness etc set by the current practitioners, and the aim of learning is to show someone how to be a practitioner – and thereby earn the right to participate in and influence the ongoing evolution of the standards.

I thought he was saying this but on last reading I couldn’t find it exactly, so either I misremembered the place or misread it. He talks about practice in some places, craft in other places (e.g. bridle-making), traditions of dialectic in others.

What is the approved practice on your threads – sidle in with a shy smile?

Normally new entrants are required to bust a move unprecedented in its scope and grace, Ken, but you’re welcome to an exception: you really need only provide a link to a sample rubric of your devising, or a sample rubric that receives your stamp of approval.

Holism is itself a defensible goal, and one that rubrics can undercut. In other words, forcing me to separate aspects of a paper that are inseparable, or to draw arbitrary lines between categories like organization and argumentation, or clarity of argumentation and clarity of style. Holism means that I can lay out some general categories, like intellectual rigor, tight organization, and marvelous writing, and then offer extensive comments on all of those. I can give or take away credit for any of these aspects in any proportion. This is fair as long as (1) students know what my categories are and (2) I don’t give a worse paper a better grade than a better one. My “learning outcome” is that the student become an intellectual.

A rubric flexible enough to be holistic is no longer a rubric, right? Once you introduce flexibility back in then you also increase the possibility of variability of results. Are rubrics a deliberate assault on the ideal of holism?

This is a very practical concern and you have brushed it aside, first, as something that can’t be dealt with, but that is an unusual problem (bad cases make bad law); second, as something that can be dealt with in a sufficiently obvious way that you trust it is obvious that I, and Zehou, are just misunderstanding how things go. You act as though my skepticism about what you say must be due to my not believing people have written about this, or my ire at your comment style. Why not consider that my skepticism is due to the fact that I think I have outlined a systematic problem with the solution you propose.

The problem here John (and I know that you know this) is – surprise! – your cavalier treatment of burden of proof requirements. Don’t you think you have some obligation to try to convince people that your way is the correct way? As opposed to the tired old “Prove to my satisfaction that what I say is wrong”? You know, since you’ve abandoned the original premise, which seemed to be soliciting some constructive suggestions?

You can be as prickly or rebarbative as you like with whatever you deem the requisite justification for that stance. But if you go that route – with not very much justification that I can see – other people are then free to hold you to a strict and strictly rational accountability. you haven’t met that standard yet.

Don’t you think you have some obligation to try to convince people that your way is the correct way?

This? Again? Please, spare us. By this point, we are all intimately familiar with the standards you would like to hold us to; if we’re not meeting them, just assume that we never will, and go on with your life. Here it’s especially egregious to press us — the persons saying “this is uncannily tricky and difficult and possibly intractable” have quite a hell of a lot less to ‘prove’ or ‘convince’ interlocutors of, than the persons who assert something to the effect of “WTF is y’alls problem, not only am I super awesome at this, but also I think super-awesomeness is so easy to achieve that I scornfully call into question your professional competence relative to mine, just because you have asserted that this is really hard and possibly intractable”

…cue you demanding that I prove to your satisfaction that you’ve done this, of course. The only open question is whether you’ll type a wink smiley or just write “Sigh.” (I do like when you don’t even encase the sigh in a parenthetical, as if it’s something you’re exhaling with declarative exasperatory force rather than wincingly releasing under your breath. It’s honest.)

But whatever, as with pretty much any open thread in which educators try to hash out the trickier and tougher aspects of the trade, it only takes a few people popping in to let everybody know how easy it all is for the competent souls of the world (to the point of demanding that we convince you it’s hard!) to make the other commenters defensive and testy and derail whatever hope of productive contemplation existed. The requisite humility is unsustainable in the face of scorn.

Don’t you think you have some obligation to try to convince people that your way is the correct way?

This? Again? Please, spare us. By this point, we are all intimately familiar with the standards you would like to hold us to; if we’re not meeting them, just assume that we never will, and go on with your life.

The problem here, Salient, is your purblind insistence that this is somehow “my” particular and idiosyncratic standard.

It’s not, not by a long shot. It is in fact SOP for people in the hard sciences.

I’ll stick with that standard, if you don’t mind. If you do, well, no one is forcing you to participate in this discussion.

Nobody’s forcing you to be so obnoxious, either.

. . . either. Thank you.

Yes, MPA, we know your feelings are paramount, whatever the actual facts are . . .

/I kid Victoria, I kid.

You’re losing it . . . but in any event, do you actually have anything of substance to contribute to this thread? You know, about how to grade papers as opposed to drive-by snark?

/Not kidding.

I’m not sure how to think about comments on just one paper by a student. The first paper I read by a student, even if an ungraded response paper of some kind, is always exciting and fraught for me. Who is this person I am about to meet? (There is something very intimate about a paper, even if you’ve already come to know its writer in, say, a small discussion class. Especially undergraduate papers — god, do they reveal more than they realize, so much of the time.) Btw, because I want to get to know someone a bit through this intimate exchange of paper+comments (which is different from the intimacy of classroom or conference exchanges — far more intimate, really), even in a seminar with one major paper near course’s end, I like to assign shorter written assignments of some kind earlier.

John’s post and comments, along with many others, have gotten me thinking about that: the importance of reading more than one paper by a particular student before being able to grapple thoughtfully with his or her writing/thinking. (Which may raise problems for the understandable — laudable — techniques described way above for coordinating paper-reading and paper-grading among multiple TA’s in a very large, university course.) One paper may not tell me enough….

Something that hasn’t been mentioned about commenting (I think it hasn’t): engaging the substance of the student’s ideas in some way. Whatever else we may have to say about clarity or organization or accuracy or argumentation or all such vital matters, we can always pick up on some observation or insight the student has had and just respond to it in some longish scribble in the margins or in the final comments — a response that takes them seriously as thinkers, as people. Something that affirms the value of their grappling and shows our interest — shows them that their engagement with a text or an issue has excited our imaginations. I don’t mean the “good” or “excellent” in the margins, which may indicate nothing more than “you have met some standard I may never really have made clear to you!” (though it’s important to sprinkle those in, where deserved) but rather, “I’m learning from you” or “my imagination is being excited by you,” the way we learn and are excited in exchanges with colleagues and friends. Such comments may take the form of expanding on the student’s idea in a learned but enthusiastic way, pointing to a related idea, posing a counter-argument…. Many forms. (Time-consuming — maybe one of the places to put the limited time available for commenting on any one paper.)

Finally, no comment is made in isolation from a larger curriculum/experience. We can’t predict or control where students will go with our comments. We can only do our best with each of our own students AND work to build a larger curriculum (in our departments, in our whole college) that will enable each student to make something valuable and useful out of our individual efforts. The old: “I imagine my world without my favorite teacher/mentor, and I am bereft; I imagine my world with only that favorite teacher/mentor, and I am bereft.”

I never write comments on students’ papers. Mind you I only grade several hundred each year. Others may do more. My feeling is that if the students can’t be bothered to make time to meet and discuss their work, I should ensure that I invest a comparable amount of energy in feedback. I’m always available by email and in person to discuss paper preparation and revision before the work is turned in. I enjoy assisting students with their research. If the first comment they receive from me about their work arrives after the paper been completed, no more need be said. If the paper is part of an ongoing discussion, then I ask them to critique their own work: how well was the question framed? Does the introduction clearly identify sources to be cited in the discussion. How fairly is the counter-argument presented and where? The technical elements of writing can be dealt with in groups. Seminar students respond extremely well to this sort of approach. Large class lecture students self-select for detailed responses. Not every student cares much about the work they do. Our efforts should directed to those who clearly do. But that’s just me.

Shaping young minds and all that. Go for it.

SoV, I am arguing that the rubric approach is less effective at securing consistency and transparency than its advocates think. Your objection seems to be that I must not care about consistency and transparency. This doesn’t follow.

No, that is not my objection. I’ve said that you do not care enough about consistency, transparency, and feedback to put the requisite comments on each individual paper. This is something you’ve explicitly said, so you can hardly go on about my “interpretation”. If you like, I will quote you on this one.

I feel sort of odd saying this but perhaps we could just stipulate, for argument purposes, that I am an alarmingly lazy, callous grader. I am utterly cold to all virtues of fairness, transparency, and pedagogic professionalism. I do not see that you have any reason to think so, yet that it is so seems to be a strong – and growing! – article of faith for you.

Sigh. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to practice a little bit of that rigor you’re supposedly grading your students on. Let me quote you, again:

They just don’t see the problems, so simply saying ‘you got a B because the organization was weak’ – although a true, general statement about what went wrong, hence why the grade was given – is often no more enlightening to students than just plain ‘you got a B’. Often the way to get the student to see how to improve is, for example, to point out, laboriously, 10 small things going wrong in the intro. (‘Why did you start this sentence this way? Why doesn’t this sentence come first? Why did you say ‘yet’ rather than ‘and’ here? What job is this intro paragraph supposed to do? What reader would be informed by this paragraph, and is that reader also the reader who would be informed by what you have to say in the rest of the paper?) This sort of sentence-by-sentence trench warfare is nothing you can wage across a whole 5-page paper. I’m not made of time, you know. But, often, there is no way to make the student see what you mean except to get nitpicky about some little bit. But then you end up not really providing ‘general comments’.

I even included the part I originally bolded (and was in part what prompted me to respond.)

These are your words, John. I’m not twisting them, I’m not giving them any sort of extra significance. They are what they are. If you want to retract what you said, fine.

But this sort of innuendo on your part, with your “seem to think” or “seem to feel” is just pathetic. Please cease and desist.

In praise of rubrics. I just pulled two texts off the shelf that some here will likely be familiar with: John Creswell’s Research Design – Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches; and Bennet and George’s Case Study and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. I did my undergraduate degree in English and American Literature in the early nineties and graduate work in the social sciences.

Hard as it is for some here to believe, not every student finds professors keen to hear dissenting views. As a teacher, I really try my best to avoid putting students in a similar position. To that end, presenting students with simple rubrics can be very helpful. Rubrics can vary. For example, we need not always grade for punctuation or spelling, unless the paper is being prepared as an exercise to demonstrate and practice these skills. I’m much more interested in the clarity of expression and the logic and organization of the argument. Work for graduate school is a different matter.

The key idea underpinning both texts is that there are some fundamental elements that make a good research paper. When these elements are present and are presented in a reader friendly fashion, the reader comes away with a clearer understanding of the topic in question. I don’t happen to like Robert Frost and his poetry, but I’m always pleased to read why others do. I express my own dislikes and likes openly in class and invite students to demonstrate where I’m wrong. These, of course, are the best kind of papers to receive and read. Writing and grading papers needn’t and really shouldn’t be tedious.

John@208, makes sense to me.
Maybe just a quibble. “But he/she can’t really know WHY he/she got that particular mark, on the basis of my comments, for the same reason you don’t know.” I should think he/she probably does have some idea why she got that mark, assuming that you don’t evaluate students’ work wildly differently than your colleagues do, or than other teachers in other contexts (e.g., secondary school) have graded this student (and commented on his or her work). Most of the time, students seem to get it, in my experience. Maybe not why they got a B rather than a B+, but they get the broad strokes of grading. Somebody way upthread, as I recall, commented on having students evaluate one another’s work — and how much harder they tend to be on one another than we are. Sometimes I have shared sample paragraphs of students’ work with the whole class, to illustrate standard problems and also strong writing and argumentation. Most students get it, very quickly. (Some teachers do a lot of that sort of thing, and do it effectively. Not my thing most of the time, but I can see its virtues.)

Rather than push the question, would you have commented differently were this the second or third paper you’d received from this student (I’m assuming it wasn’t), I’d like to ask something a little different. Say this was the second or third paper from this student in this course, or you’d taught him or her previously. If this paper basically and honestly struck you as a C+ paper, but you knew the student had been struggling to improve certain elements of her writing and thinking and had, in fact, improved on those, and you judged that, even more than your commenting on the improvements, giving her a B- would give her just enough encouragement to keep her trying, would you give her the B-? (Assuming this wasn’t somehow going to commit you to giving her an undeserved final grade.) I know I would (though for some reason, I probably wouldn’t give an A- to a B+ paper under the same circumstances). Probably very sinful of me, in the eyes of some.

Zehou, what use is it to the student if the paper is graded, not the performance (a distinction I’m not sure I understand), without any reflection and comment by the reader on the (possible) “cause”? Seldom do I read a student paper that I think, gee, the world should see this, for its insights! (And that’s the one context in which I can imagine thinking only in terms of “the paper.”) If you’re commenting on the paper in order to help the student (and not just in order to grade the paper), don’t you need to think about causes? Maybe you’re only thinking about grades, but this obsession with grading distracts, it seems to me, with our primary activities when we’re reading papers.

I agree, though: grading a paper is NOT grading the student, something very important to convey to students.

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/11/340824/why-liberal-arts-professors-should-learn-to-love-quantitative-assessments-of-student-learning/

Having been listening obsessively in the last week to different performances of Dido’s lament (“Thy hand, Belinda…. When I am laid in earth…”) in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, I suddenly realize we’ve left out the performing and visual arts in this discussion. Gets me to thinking. As my (almost) first and (certainly) most influential violin teacher counseled me before a recital (a million years ago), “Just make your performance convincing. While your audience is listening to you play, they will respond: This is the only way it can be played.”
So, grading. You know, you audition, and someone has to decide, yes or no, first chair, middle chair, last chair, not at all. Presumably, those decisions have something properly to do with things that matter in terms of future performance for a larger audience. (Cf. grad schools, some employers.)
Papers and their comments. More like the lesson you’ve prepared for with all your heart (or not much at all) that week. An ongoing conversation/struggle/love affair (the last most of all) between the music and the musician (with that teacher in there, prodding, criticizing, encouraging — the disappearing teacher! but no musician ever forgets her teachers!). I guess I’m saying, yes, some kind of evaluation (grading) has to be done. But that whole project is subsidiary to the large project: the music.

Why not be objective? Because then you’d get a D or an F. Because you didn’t actually succeed in getting anything down, without help from charitable assumptions by the reader.

+1. I’d go further: The numerical grade encodes a measurement of how much charity the reader needs to expend reading through from beginning to end. Even if that’s irrelevant to how the grade was arrived at, the correspondence is nearly guaranteed.