As I gear up for teaching the writing class again this spring, I've been thinking a lot about how to make the grading more tolerable. In a Profhacker post last September, Brian Croxall summed up my own feeling about grading pretty well: "The thing that I dislike most about teaching is grading... The reason I typically don’t like grading is because my grading sessions often leave me feeling conflicted about the final scores I give students. “Is this essay an 87 (AKA a B)? Or is it an 88? How does it compare to that 84 I just read?” For personal reasons, my internal fairness meter gets really worked up by this process, and I have found that grading papers produces a bathetic (and pathetic) amount of handwringing on my part that is not productive in any which way." Croxall goes on to say that he planned to try using only straight letter grades on papers (i.e., A, B, etc. with no pluses or minuses): "...while it might be hard to know the difference between an 87...
Observations and ramblings of an economist with a passion for teaching...