Adventures with Faculty, Vol. 3

Yesterday, during our department meeting, we had a "Come to Jesus" about grade inflation. Our department chair had been looking at numbers and reading some papers that didn't seem to match up with gpa figures, etc. So we had an exercise.

The dreaded grading exercise.

Shades of Grad School! Well, I'm game--it's worth reminding ourselves of the nature of our work, of the responsibility we have to give proper feedback, and so on. As the exercise wore on, though, I began to wonder about its usefulness:

First, grading in a controlled setting where the outcome is hypothetical has no relation to the work we actually do, where we have certain pedagogical goals for the grades we assign, where we have the long view, where we have to look these students in the eye and, let's face it, do course evaluations and have our names up on ratemyprofessor. What I put on a hypothetical paper in an exercise has no consequence or outcome.

Second, particularly in a case where one has a wide range of professorial generations present, these exercises become muddled by instructors declaiming loudly the reason for their oh-so-pure standards:

• "I gave it an F! Because the sentence structure could have been better!"
• "Oh, horrors! This student totally misread this passage from Blake's 'Infant Sorrow'! You know, when I have taught this poem, I've made sure to . . . ."
• "This student used 'consequently!' Clearly, that's a D! At best!"
• "The first thing I do when I start a class is tell the students that they must not ever use the first person pronoun!"

You may think that I exaggerate, but I don't. Perhaps a grading exercise is useful when it allows a veteran teacher to orate for a while, reminding us "junior" faculty of a time when Standards were Standards, by George!

I think I was pretty much grouchy and stone-faced for the whole six hours yesterday. I know, you're all amazed that such a thing could happen.