Happy Valentine's Day! I gave some candy to my students yesterday, the colorful little hearts with messages written on them, to teach them some "culture."
This week, I felt like an answering machine, repeating the same things over and over and over. On Monday, my students had to bring their first draft of project two. While they were reading each other's drafts and making comments on them, I quickly read a copy of their first draft (they had to bring several copies) and commented them. It is incredible that I gave them the "outline" of their outline for this paper, I explained several times what this paper was supposed to say, and still, many students had managed to just do whatever with their first draft. During the weekend, I had read their outline and made several comments on them, and on Monday, I made some comments on their first draft too before I returned them, and still, when I met with everyone on Tuesday and Wednesday for individual conferences in my office, some students had not understood that they had to discuss ALL four of the main points I had put on the original outline. These conferences were very frustrating. I don't know where I go wrong; I don't know how much more I have to do for them to understand what I want them to do. On Thursday, the students had to bring an electronic copy of their third draft and read each other's papers on the computers so that they could make comments with the "insert comments" function in Word. I was so frustrated, at that point, that I said, "I expect perfection with this papers, because I explained the same things over and over to you!" The final draft was due on Friday, and I read half of them already and I still find that there's always one of the four sections that is missing or underdeveloped. Still, to be honest, a few students have also done a great job. I am not grading, right now, just reading, to get a feel for the overall quality of the work done.
Yesterday, I was doing some reading for my Human Resources class and went through a whole section on assessment. Grading papers always makes me feel somehow uncomfortable and ask those questions, but yesterday I tried to phrase my concerns with concrete words. When I was in my mentoring group last year, we had to develop grading criteria for the papers we had to grade, and our mentor showed us different ways to do it. The other teachers in my groups decided on using different techniques and criteria, and I developed a set of criteria that I have used pretty much for everything since then. I value organization the most, and the development of ideas too, and then of course if the assignment follows the directions, and finally I give (or take) a few points for "language-related" items such as grammar, sentence structure, variety of sentences, spelling, etc. The last thing on my list is about format. I give some extra credit for going to the writing lab, and this can be good, because it encourages my students to go there and take advantage of their resources, but this semester, it seems like my students have decided that this is the best way to get good grades so they go there 3-4 times per paper, which ends up giving them really high grades on their final drafts! Anyway, two things make me a little uncomfortable when I use my grading criteria to give feedback on my students' papers: first, their very general meaning, and second, my relative way of using them.
First, what I mean by "general meaning" is that I use definitions that can be interpreted very broadly. Of course, I know what I expect, but I don't know if the students know what I expect well enough from those criteria (which I give with the assignment description). If I say, "the ideas are well developed" or "the organization is logical," this can mean 100 different things to 100 different people. But then I don't want to say, "first there is an introduction, and in the body, you discuss this and that..." because I think that this is exactly what I explain in class and on the assignment description. At the same time, those very broad criteria allow me to include basically anything in them, to adapt them to the needs of the paper I am reading, and to stay very flexible as to the way I use the. While this is practical, I sometimes wonder if it is very fair. Sometimes I find one particular problem in a paper and find myself wondering, "OK now, in which criteria could this problem fit?" Having more specific criteria, on the other hand, could be useful and more "scientific," but then I am having a very difficult time thinking ahead about all the problems I might encounter and all the things I want to find in the papers. Another thing that I realize, too, is that having a great "organization" doesn't mean the same to everyone, and that one great organization doesn't look like another great organization. Some of the other teachers I know use even broader grading criteria than I do. I use numbers, and with international students do ask for a few more specific things, but I know that some teachers use check marks in criteria such as "organization: insufficient, poor, good, excellent." Is that better? Is that worse? Is that helpful?
The second problem is about relative grading. I have been teaching for a while now and am able to get a feeling for what I expect in an A paper or a C paper. My grading criteria also help me grade on an absolute scale, and everyone can get an A if they deserve it, but I sometimes find myself grading a paper (student A) and then another (student B) and thinking "oh, student A did that better than student B" and then adjusting student A's grade to make it higher than student B's. If I had the time, I could first organize all the papers on a relative scale for the development of ideas and record the results (who is the best, who is the least efficient), and then do the same thing with organization, record it, and then with format, etc. and at the end, I would compute all the results and figure out who is at the top of all the lists, who is in the middle, and who is at the bottom, and give completely relative grades on a curve: students at the bottom of most lists get a D, those at the top get an A. Of course, this wouldn't be fair because the students at the bottom might not be THAT MUCH different from the ones at the top. So in the end, it's a good thing I don't use this technique. However, in spite of my relatively (see above!) specific grading criteria, which allow everyone to get an A if they deserve to, I sometimes feel that I am too subjective, that I let myself be influenced by little things (agh, he still hasn't gotten the page number thing right!) and then lose my objectivity (halo effect?), that I let myself be influenced by the efforts I think the students might have put in their papers and their attitude in class and during conferences, and finally, that I am strongly influenced by my overall "liking" of some students or others (he often smiles, he is always on time, he participates, he never complains, etc.). Does that make me a bad teacher? To what extent is this avoidable? Are other teachers doing the same thing? I don't know, and I wonder to what extent total objectivity is attainable. I guess it becomes harder in situations like my class this semester where I have decided to get to know the students better and not just in class but also outside of class, with the movie night, for example. In the end, I feel that don't just grade papers but that I judge individuals.
Something that added to this week's frustrations is that I "had" to add a new student to my class. On Wednesday, in-between conferences, someone came to my office and asked if he could add my class because he was from Pakistan, had had some problems with his visa and all, had had to drop all of his classes and now had to re-register again (end of the fifth week!) for at least 12 credits in order to be "legal." I know that I didn't have to accept him but I think no one else would have accepted him, so I did. I don't know how things will go, but I did make him sign a contract (in front of a witness) saying that he accepted the following requirements and would accept an F or drop out of the class if: he didn't get a B or better on his "second" paper (due this Monday), write the first paper and do all the readings he missed by midterm, and miss class even one day. I know this is cruel, but he has missed so many days already, that I will have a lot of work explaining him what he has missed and what he must do to catch up. I don't want to spend extra time doing this if he misses class for whatever reason in the future. So far, the other students seem to have accepted him, but we'll see what happens and how his first paper is. I did tell him that I was the meanest of all the 106i teachers, but it didn't seem to bother him. I am now trying to talk to his advisor or the Dean or Students because I didn't get any formal letter explaining his exceptional situation and find it unacceptable.
So, we started the third project: a summary. Easy project, you'd think, but I don't want to butcher this step and then have to go over it again when we do the comparison/contrast/review paper. I had our usual little activity to introduce summaries, where I ask the students to write about a movie they liked in 5 sentences, and then 3, and then 1, and then 10 words. Finally, I put them in groups and asked them to make a list of what you do find and what you don't find in summaries. Last semester, the students had done a great job, but this time, it was pretty pathetic. I heard main ideas, main points, introduction, key words, and that's about it. We are going to have to work hard on this next week! And on how to find articles too, and good ones at that too. So, next week, we have a lot of work, and this short summary is already due next Friday, so we'll have class every day. Let's hope for the best!
