At the Army school I’m at right now, there is a professor that is grading our papers on an individual level. The smartest guy in the class just got his paper back as a B-, saying that he could do much better work. This paper would easily be an A compared to the average (our entire class is about 1,000; classroom size is 16). The teacher said something to the effect that he expects to see improvements in everyone’s writing over time. These papers are very subjective from a grading perspective, although there are some objective criteria, like grammar, structure, thesis clarity, conclusion, etc).
I’ll get my paper back today, but I’m expecting the same grade, although I’m a (relatively) good writer. My guess is I can find any number of folks here with truly horrible papers (grammar problems, structure problems, clarity, etc) that are also a B-, so it seems unfair that a school system would allow a grading policy such as this. (A little background on this school: there’s a lot of work and reading and many people are also pressured to take an unrelated Master’s course, so the work load is heavy and many of these people, like myself, are just going to do whatever they need in order to get the B+ or A-, especially the really smart guys, who figure their C work is an A at this school, and at any commercial university they’d probably be right. C’s are given out rarely here; a B- is considered a low grade)
Do any other teachers use this method? Are there any arguments for or against it? I know there is a huge subjective component when grading papers, but should you compare with the average, or with the expected writers’ capabilities?
Well, it kinda blows if the actual grade you get is used to rank you against others and has some real world consequences. Which is generally the point of grades in the first place.
But he does have a point at a personal level. If you are not improving and not working much at improving, you really arent getting much out of the class are you , so whats the point ?
If I was even inclined to do such a thing, about the most I would let it affect the grade would be one grade step. If was a B+ relative to all the others but I thought you were really coasting I might drop it to a B.
No, I do not think this is acceptable. I see what he’s doing: he’s giving you a low grade to motivate you into improving, figuring it’s a waste of everyone’s time for the students with a high skill level to coast. My guess is that the initial B- would not figure very heavily into the final grade, if at all.
It sounds like this is a writing class. Writing classes are a bitch to grade. No matter what you do, you get accused of being “too subjective” by students who are lazy, sloppy, or poor writers, and you get the same accusation from the grade-grubbers who aren’t happy with their A- grades. These days, instructors often use rubrics to make the grading seem less subjective, but the fact is it often takes more time than the instructor has available to explain WHY it’s a C paper, since that judgement is the sum total of years of experience and often minor stylistic nuances that point to overall ability.
I’m not sure he’s got a finely honed pedagogy, though; he may just be lazy. It is true that every writer can improve, but it sounds like he’s trying to use a one-size-fits-all method of teaching. Under his system, you would be rewarded for spending writing the early papers in about fifteen minutes while watching your sister de-worm the cat with Oprah on too loud in the background. Then your later half-assed efforts, written over an hour-long period while slightly drunk, though still substandard, would each earn you a shiny A.
That’s why I’m putting the question out there–I really can’t come up with a solid reason why this is a bad practice. It just seems to me like there’s an element of unfairness to it.
As far as the papers go, half of me agrees with you, billfish, and the other half says that we’re here to learn the subject (in this case, military history, not English composition).
It’s bad because your transcript isn’t going to have an individualized explanation of what your course grade means.
Does your school have a standard explanation of what an A, B, etc. is supposed to represent? If so, your grade (at least for the course as a whole) ought to conform to that.
Well, if you wanna go all military mindset on this, the military wants people who know what they are doing. They ALSO want people to do their best, cause sometimes thats life and death important.
So, you could look at part of this writing grade as being a grade that measures something very important that has virtually nothing to do with writing itself.
And, yes, as pointed out above, its easy to game the system if you know how it works ahead of time. Which brings us to that old moral quandary of "if others are cheating, should you as well " ?
I can’t say I love this grading method, but I can sorta see the thought process here. Note, not a teacher here, but many a year as suffering student.
That would piss me right the hell off. Why? Because I’m a better writer than 95% that join the Army. Having known many, many Army teachers, I can just about guarantee that I’m a better writer than even that guy. Even if I’m not better, I doubt there’s anything he could teach me that I haven’t already learned in high school and four years of college. It’d be like my high school football coach trying to teach a pro a thing or two.
He should be grading on how you perform, not on how much he thinks you can improve. But you know the Army slogan, “Play the game.” Just put up with it and ride his particular little rollercoaster.
Some teachers do this because they can then show their superiors how every student improved during his/her course. “Look here, when they came to me, nobody got better than a B-, but now everyone has nice shiny A+s.”
It’s unfair. I had a to take a mandatory writing class, which was well beneath my skill level. The teacher herself even recognized my abilities and asked me to help tutor students in that class. Then I got my midterm paper back and it had a BC grade (instead of B- or C+, they had BC, which was between a B and a C), saying I needed to push myself harder, etc. She didn’t say anything about grading on an individual basis before hand, and I was pissed. I showed my paper to my adviser (I was an English major, so my adviser happened to be one of the teacher’s superiors). My adviser said I did everything asked of me on the paper and then some. I should have received an A. So I talked to the teacher, she “relented” and “compromised” and gave me an AB.
I freaking blew her out of the water on the final paper.
I don’t like it because there’s absolutely no incentive for good students to challenge themselves at all, and because unless all the assignments are all very, very similar, a person’s individual variability would probably vary sufficiently among assignments to make such a grading scheme meaningless.
I’m not a great writer, but I’m not awful. However, my writing ability varies widely depending on the topic and structure. For example, for a concise essay outlining a particular topic, I’d do well, but for a longer more rambling assignment, or anything that was fiction, I’d tend to wander. Thus, I’d be penalized if a course’s final paper was long but our early assignments were shorter. There are too many confounds for individual grading to have much validity, in my opinion.
For example, when I teach grad students, they often choose to present papers related to their research interests early in the term, then they branch out into other fields later. Should they all get Ds because their early presentations are much better informed than their later ones?
I would say the incentive to do well and challenge themselves is the grade–you get kocked down a grade if you’re not putting in 90-100%.
My teacher was very upfront about this at the beginning. How would you have felt if your teacher had told you about it right off the bat? It may make it fairer, but does it make it fair?
To be fair to my Prof, I don’t think that’s his motive. I think he simply wants to challenge us. He’s a great teacher, and does spend time grading our papers, providing constructive feedback.
If you worry excessively about “fair” in the military, you are gonna go crazy. I wasnt in the military, but I worked with them.
I think the better question to ask is this. Does this process/procedure/whatever make sense from a military organization/goals standpoint ? Even with that question I wouldnt dwell on it too much.
In the military, the needs of the many definitely outweigh the needs of the few.
Anyway, what happens if the student pretends to be not that smart by writing bad papers and then gets away with writing only mediocre papers after? Do the mediocre ones get A’s instead of C’s?
Well, isn’t doing really well a good thing? If she had done horribly and gotten a superior teacher to change the grade from a C ton A,that would be lame, I admit, but this seems like she learned something from the process.
This is why I am an advocate of grade-less evaluation systems. Shoving your students into five relatively arbitrary categories is next to meaningless.
A student who has great potential but takes the lazy way out is different than a student who works their ass off but has a long way to go. A student who turns in decent but imperfect poli-sci paper on the role of micro-finance and cell phone credit systems in Sub-Saharan Africa should not get the same evaluation as someone who turns in an easy but well done paper on the death penalty in America.
Where I went to school. the goal was not to categorize students, but to give them the opportunity to push themselves as far as they could go. Teachers did not give grades, but rather detailed evaluations of exactly what the students were doing and all of their strengths and weaknesses. Our evaluations included information such as the scope of our topics, our improvement, etc. To some, this acted as a chance to slack off. But for people like me, it offered the motivation to push ourselves beyond the limit of an “A” and truly challenge ourselves to do the absolute best we could do. Because really, a great teacher does not just inspire their students to earn an “A”, but inspires them to be the very best they can be. And with standard grades, often the motivation just isn’t there.
In any half-decent assessment scheme, grades are linked to marking criteria. If you meet the criteria, you get the grade. The biggest trouble with this individual scheme is that it must necessarily be entirely subjective. This makes it rotten both as a teaching tool AND as a means of drawing conclusions and reporting on students.
Being told “you can do better” is useless. I would want to know which of the learning objectives I haven’t met, and what I need to do to meet them. History is not THAT subjective as a subject - there are particular skills you need to show, and it isn’t hard to measure (roughly) how well you show them.
I had this happen to me in the 2nd grade. Kept finishing all my work way before everyone else in the class, so the teacher (a nun) decided to grade me, and only me, on the kind of “curve” described in the OP, such that I would get a B for work that another student would get an A for. She made the mistake of putting another student’s work into a homework packet for my parents to read, which allowed them to do a direct comparison to mine-to put it mildly, my dad was not happy with her. Worked so well that I considered teachers my bitter adversaries well into high school.