Grading woes

[rivkat]

Background: My exam had two questions, one worth 20% and the other 80%. I just gave someone who did quite well on the first question -- in the top 14 of 82 -- the lowest score by far on the second question. From A- to C (and that's generous) in one fell swoop. I feel like a failure. The student in question obviously knew copyright law, but didn't treat the second question as if it raised copyright questions at all. I gave a standard (for law school) issue-spotter exam, and everyone else so far has managed to spot the copyright issue in the exam for this copyright class. The student's obviously smart; where did I go wrong? I just know s/he's going to see me about the grade, and I don't know what to say other than "everyone else noticed this."

Argh!

More book reviews soon, I promise, after I finish the neverending grading.

Comments

[ter369.livejournal.com]

I just know s/he's going to see me about the grade, and I don't know what to say other than "everyone else noticed this."

It might be interesting (for you) and useful (for the student) to ask what they were thinking of instead of noticing what other students noticed.

I know nothing about how law is taught or learned. But I dropped out of my PhD program (lit) shortly after my committe chairman told me that if two hundred scholars said X about Bertold Brecht and I wrote a paper on Y, it was up to me to figure out why I was wrong.

I can only assume Einstein didn't listen to anyone who told him something like that. Unless he found that someone else's "wrong" was his new idea.

Theory and interpretation aren't the same as absorbing core information, but maybe your student was off on a tangent - with a new thought - and missed the essential focus in the exam question? Just asking him/her that question might help them in their future courses.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a good point, though in this case it wasn't a new thought -- the student did catch the non-copyright issue that I hoped everybody would get and spent 3000 words on that, whereas most people gave it 250 or so. I feel terrible, but in the end I can't justify a good grade because (1) it's a copyright class and (2) in the real world, problems don't show up with categories; it's a lawyer's job to look at them and say, "Here's the three possible issues and here's what I think."

I was just discussing the issue of new insights v. old methods with my husband. In A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar emphasizes that John Nash often didn't know squat about the fields in which he tackled big problems, and this may have freed him from preconceptions as well as occasionally leading him down blind alleys/requiring him to reinvent the wheel. I don't doubt that genius can work that way, but, frankly, it's not the way to bet. That's a somewhat different issue from the X/Y interpretations of Brecht -- I understand exactly how awful your chair's statement was, and that's an inane way to think about it. Unfortunately, this wasn't a test of thinking in general; it was a test of knowledge and application of knowledge in a particular field.

If this student is in fact an underappreciated genius, my only consolation is that I've perpetuated the grand tradition of giving poor grades to a mind beyond mine.