Evolution of My Grading

As an undergraduate, I worked in my college's writing center where I learned to mark student essays in a manner that inspired thoughtful revision. For example, my tutor training taught me to ask questions instead of bark orders—"Can you tell a specific story to illustrate this?" rather than "Give an example." Because I worked one on one with just a handful of students per day, I had time to evaluate their writing in a meaningful manner.

When I got my first real class to teach—one section of prep writing as an adjunct—I still had time to comment in ways that I hoped inspired improvement. But as my dean concluded that I had "the gift" and began giving me more and more classes, and then a temporary full-time contract, and then the coveted tenure-track position, I could no longer comment as carefully on the work of 150 students, each of whom had to write 6,000 words per semester, a state mandate.

My grading changed from thoughtful remarks about content to covering my ass by marking sentence errors. I believed this strategy was necessary because of the precariousness of my employment. In those early days, I quickly learned that students shared their papers with everyone. As a result, I began to mark essays so that if a senior colleague or my dean got his hands on the paper, he would know that A) I read the entire essay, and B) I knew my grammar. Another factor influencing the number of sentence errors I marked was the do-or-die, department-graded final exam. At the time, the college required that freshman composition students pass this final exam essay or fail the entire class. The most common cause of failure was too many grammar mistakes, especially when a paper indicated a lack of fluency with English. So I marked every sentence error—top to bottom—in the essay; if a Korean left out articles, I added _^^a, _^^an, or _^^the wherever necessary. No student could complain, after receiving a semester's worth of papers dripping with green ink, that she didn't realize that she was in jeopardy of failing the class heading into the final exam.

Once I was awarded tenure, new responsibilities and observations affected my grading. Freedom from paranoia didn't turn me into a lazy grader who didn't really read, nor did I become a hardass no longer concerned if students complained about my unreasonable demands. Instead, I began loosening my standards, mostly as a result of the hypocrisy my colleagues demonstrated.

I first learned that my classroom expectations weren't in line with the reality of academia when I began editing a professional journal showcasing the interests/research of the college's faculty and staff. Before this experience, I was really nitpicky about works cited page entries/parenthetical references in student essays. Because my students and I had a lengthy discussion/practice of how to compose works cited page entries and the corresponding parenthetical references, I took 2 points for every error I found in the final document, no matter how small. A miscapitalized word, a missing mark of punctuation, forgetting the brackets that enclose the web address—minus 2 points, minus 2 points, minus 2 points! I could get an essay down to a 70 on the works cited page alone. But after reading submissions from PhDs who made up their own personal citation style as they wrote—which then required extensive changes from me and the other editors—I decided I wasn't going to bust first-year students so harshly for something that their professors couldn't do correctly themselves. If the list of sources looks works cited page-ish, I'm okay with it now.

I am crystal clear about what plagiarism is and my penalties for it. Those penalities, however, have lessened over the years. In the past, if a student lifted a single sentence verbatim from a source and neglected to include quotation marks around it—whether or not a parenthetical reference followed—she earned a zero. A second instance meant I WFed the student from the class. Not so any longer. When I heard a colleague bitch that the papers she wrote for her daughter's college history class were earning only B's, I quit losing my temper over plagiarism. How could I bust students for doing something my fellow faculty—as well as more prestigious teachers at better schools—did without real penalty? A lifted sentence without quotation marks is just a punctuation error for me now.

I used to agree with my colleagues that too many errors—no matter how intelligent or insightful the content—equalled a failing paper. Then I began to serve on faculty hiring committees where candidates had to write impromptu essays right before the interview. Some of these pieces were grammatical disasters, but I would listen to faculty who argued that we should overlook the mistakes, especially if they really liked a candidate. "He was nervous," "Twenty minutes is too little time to write and proofread," or "She is very good with students" were some of the excuses I heard when committee members wanted to move a candidate to the second interview with the provost. Then when our Chief Learning Officer sent an email introducing a new hire as a former principle of a local high school—for even she didn't remember that your principal is your pal—I gave up. I'm not failing students for making mistakes at the beginning of their higher education that folks with advanced degrees can't handle themselves.

If you get a group of faculty together in a room, they will insist that they are, by god, upholding standards. They will bemoan the fact that students today can't do things they themselves did stupendously back in the day. Anyone listening should have plenty of skepticism, though. Most of those faculty have skills only slightly better than the average first and second-year students in their classes.

I still give plenty of Ds and Fs as final grades, but those students don't pass because they either A) can't follow simple directions, usually because they didn't attend class to get them, or B) can't get the work done at all. Skills like documenting sources, avoiding plagiarism, and editing for sentence errors are not what get the students in my classes in trouble.