April 19, 2007 8:00 AM

Grading

Assigning a grade to an essay never comes easily. One must make various decisions in the process regarding content and form and adherence to guidelines and mastery of material, etc. One must consider the esteem of the student at the other end of the process. Multifarious decisions with multifarious ramifications are at stake when grading essays. Grading, in general, is a dangerous game, but a requisite one. Like it or not, as educators, we are in the business of grades.

 

Grades are complex signifiers. They attest, at times, to raw effort of a student. They attest, also, to the mastery of material or knowledge base. Assigning them is at once decyphering what they might finally mean and engendering on some level that meaning as well. One must also consider that the grade one assigns does not assess the essay or test alone, but can serve as an assessment of course content, quality of instruction and success of the teacher as well.

 

So often, we look at grades only as an assessment of the student, when we ought also to consider them as a measure of the success of the course and the teacher as well. This is a bold thing to say, I suspect. It is not an original idea by the way.

 

For years now, educators have been thinking about the whole notion of grades and what they actually measure. I suppose one might say they have quarreled over it as well and done so mostly on the level of theory. Those of us in the trenches have carried on grading and grading and grading with our own assumptions about what the grades mean.

 

What does it do to grades to think of them as an assessment of the teacher and the course rather than the student? If I find I am giving a class a set of "C's," then what does it say about my teaching? When a student fails, doesn't the teacher fail? When a student earns an "A," doesn't the teacher feel a sense of accomplishment?

 

Before I travel too far down this path, I know that grades measure many things simultaneously, and that is what makes them such powerful tools, so it would be foolish to suggest that they measure only one thing at a time. Also, finally, the students face the real work with assessments and thus earn the grades that the assessments deliver. The grades are theirs to claim as their own, finally. But, the grades can and do indicate other things beyond a student's ability and effort. That's why they are so hard to assign. The longer I am at it, the harder it becomes.