I will add one more thing, though. I sometimes have students for whom English is a second or third language and whose grasp of English is quite poor. I do grade those papers less strenuously than I do the papers of those students who are native English speakers. I suppose that’s not completely fair, but it doesn’t seem fair to apply the same standards to both groups, either.
Argh, no!
The OP has brought back memories of that teacher who was forced into retirement and who made his parting gift flunking as many people in the class as he could get away with. In my case, “my replacement has also graded every exam, he gave you a B+ but I’m giving you an F because I consider you can do better” - yes, that’s the difference between B+ and A+, the B+ can do better!
If those grades are “grades” (i.e., they’re for personal orientation like the first project we had to hand in to one of the teachers in my current program, but they won’t go on any official papers), ok. But otherwise it’s a combination of grade inflation for the bad and grade deflation for those who are already good at the start of the course.
I did do something similar to one of my students once but it was as a personal “heads up” between him and me and it brought him down all the way from ohmygosh an A+ to an A- (he hadn’t been doing the homework at all because “it’s just a tiny part of the grade” - well, here’s your grade with a zero for the part you couldn’t be arsed doing… I was willing to change it if it would affect his chances to get into dentistry school negatively, but he ran a quick calculation and said it didn’t so leave it that way because then he’d remember the value of “a little bit more”).
I’ve had to take several classes I could have taught myself, and two which were retakes of some of the most obnoxious and useless things I’d already studied. And passed. And yes, I was the one to whom other students came with questions, apparently I have a face that says “tourist information and free tutoring here.” (Heck, it’s happening again, and this time I’m in a group and a field in which half the students have more previous training than I do.)
One of those classes was a compulsory Organic Chemistry class; we’d all had to take an exam from the American Chemical Society (think SAT for Chemists) on which I’d missed one question placing me at “>98%” and another student had gotten everything right, thus “>99%.” When we had the bollocks to ask “why isn’t that test used to see who can skip the organic class, instead of only to see who needs to take organic at the undergraduate level,” you would have thought we were proposing teaching electrochemistry in the buff.
But that teacher has a class of 16, so why doesn’t it work for them? Isn’t their job part of the real world?
All told he has four classes of 16 each. More, but still do-able. He knows each of our names in my class, so I’m assuming he does for the other three as well.
When I was a sophomore in HS, I had this situation happen where as the ‘bright’ student I got a worse grade for a better paper than other students.
It motivated me to not turn in another paper for the rest of the semester.
I had to go to summer school, which was completely easy and kind of fun actually. You see I went to a private HS but they did not have summer school, so I went to public summer school.
After hearing my report of summer school, my school started to host their own summer school make up courses.
I experienced this same phenomenon when taking foreign language classes - I got bored when we spent an entire month learning a list of 50 vocabulary words, and took the time to advance my learnin’. When faced with a paper (to be fair, papers weren’t very long the first couple of years), I very often got B’s or C’s because the teacher “knew I could do better,” and the A’s were given to people who “tried really hard”.
You know, we used to have two separate grades when I was little (the poor teachers are now up to something like four): the grade itself and the “attitude.”
The grade was about how much you knew, the attitude is self-explanatory. I think it was actually a pretty good system. Of course it could be missaplied, like any other system, but it attempted to separate the “this guy got 4 out of 5 exercises right” part from the “I’m tired of seeing him staring out the window” part.
If she had said up front that she was grading based on our personal abilities, I perhaps wouldn’t have been so outspoken about my abilities. I wouldn’t shown her in class that I was so above the level of the class. I wouldn’t have done her the favor of tutoring her students because her daughter was in soccer, so she couldn’t have as long of office hours. I was going above and beyond in that class, and she felt the need to penalize me because I didn’t write some incredibly amazing midterm paper.
We didn’t get graded on participation… so I flat out wouldn’t have participated. I wouldn’t have let her know what my skill level was, because then I could have gotten a better grade. You know that’s unfair, too. Not unfair to me, per se, but to the rest of the class because they could not benefit from my participation and insight. It would have been selfish of me to not participate, so I opted not to be selfish and it bit me in the arse.
Really? The final paper took me about a half hour to write. I pulled out my Elements of Style and followed it note by note. The first paper had some of my own personal style (I have a creative writing degree, this was an expository writing class). I actually took less time to write this paper than the mid term. I was trying to impress her on the mid term. By the end, I knew she wanted something dry and impersonal. So I put the facts down, connected them… and she said the paper was “exceptional” in the comments I got when I got the paper back. (I never said that my paper is so amazing that the Gods worship it. But she was impressed by it. I am by no means that conceited about my writing.)
Her plan backfired. I did less work for that paper. I didn’t work my butt off. I did the exact OPPOSITE.
So, yeah :rolleyes:
I feel that grading students based on effort does everyone involved a disservice. It is difficult to ascertain how much effort someone really put in, but in any case, aren’t results what matter? I don’t want my lawyer to try really hard, I want her to know what she’s doing. I also don’t give students a break for being ESL. I’m sympathetic (been there with another language, and it’s really, really difficult), but if they choose to get a degree through the medium of English, well, they knew what they signed on for. I don’t get why effort is even considered. Can someone enlighten me?
To elaborate, I also think it’s way, way more work to grade each student to a different scale. I have occasionally pulled students aside and explained that they were beyond this class, but that the university required proof that people had met a certain minimum. I usually ask them whether they want to coast or try to waive the requirement. In most cases they are happy to coast.
My point was that there’s no reason to go out of your comfort zone and try something new or more difficult if you’re going to be graded on “improvement”; it punishes growth and rewards students who do what they already know.
My husband had a poetry class in college that was graded exactly on this system; he made sure his first few assignments were absolute garbage, and he got an A for the course. He also thought the course was a joke. How is that an effective system?