Grades, and SV

[rivkat]

Hi, cruel world!

Still muddling through grading. I've discovered that all the college profs I talk to are hardline, and would fail or give a really, really bad grade to the student I described a few days ago. All the law professors, by contrast, want to cut the kid a break and think a B or B- would be justified because it's rare enough that anyone shows true understanding of a subject. I don't know the source of the divide. Perhaps the law school profs are more confident that any student in the school has some minimum level of competence; perhaps the realities of grade inflation are such that a B- would be a serious insult -- as is certainly the case at my school. One of the things that's made me wobble is that a C would, and a B- still might, foreclose a certain set of jobs for this student. That's just the way things are in the legal world, and maybe grade inflation is to blame. We'll see what happens when the student comes to see me. I'm glad I don't know who it is. Blind grading has risks and surprises, but it's better than having the temptation to shade the grade from the get-go.

MustangSally has made me a SV page at last! Nothing new on there, but change your bookmarks for Disenchanted Kingdom. Graphics-negative for her ease and yours! Thanks, MS. If she's willing, I may put an easter egg somewhere on the page, but not yet.

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

My sympathies to you; the awfulness of grading is really why I got out of teaching (which I used to love). I spent some formative years at UC Santa Cruz, which (at the time) only provided narrative evaluations, and no grades, and ever since then I've never really been able to take seriously as anything other than a rather arbitrary and horrendously *thin* way of evaluating a student's achievements.

[cbking.livejournal.com]

It's so interesting to see the world of law school grading from the other side! I think the hardest thing for me as a law student was getting used to the the B-curve, which did horrendous things to my intellectual ego for a while, and then just started to seem normal. Had I gotten a C (or even a B-) in law school I think I would have cried, and in this job market it probably is the kiss of death, but I sympathize with the difficulty of your decision. I guess it tends to cheapen the other students' work if a B can stand for not explicating the correct issues. Good luck figuring it out!

[evenbiggerdog.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm just hopelessly old-school, but I think if you screw up you should pay the consequences. Grade inflation...? Is that the college version of "pass him, let the next teacher worry about it"?

So they get a B or a C. BFD. Maybe that's what it takes to wake some people up and make them, you know... study. Consider the case of Winston Churchill, an early scholastic failure who became determined to make up for it.