"A" is for "Rhinoceros"

More Reflections on Grades and Grading

It's the grading that I hate. Now, teaching is great -- the classroom give-and-take, the chance to focus our energy on ideas and books, the joy of watching the students open themselves up to their own creative potential. As writing teachers we try to foster a sense that writing isn't like those other subjects, isn't like the obdurate facts of physics or the stubborn dates of history -- no, writing is the grand adventure of language and creativity and self-exploration.

A course in writing isn't a forced march along a narrow path, where concept A must be mastered before moving on to concept B, and then C, and so on. Instead, I tell my students, writing is more like wandering around in a wide, sunny meadow; there's no single right path, no absolute order in which skills or concepts must be mastered, and certainly no one point of convergence. You write about those wild flowers over there, I write about that formation of rocks over there, we're both happy, we're both right. This is how writers can think about the work that they do, and this is the kind of writing classroom I want to teach in.

But the rhinoceros in the back of the classroom, the dark presence, is always the grading. However much I love the happy meadow, the fact is that I've been wandering around in there for a decade or two longer than any of my students, and I've taken enough wrong turns in there to know that there are wrong turns to be taken -- that is, fruitless turns -- just as I know that certain other approaches are useful and valuable and worthy of being learned. The fact is, most of the students aren't in the meadow yet; they're stuck in the woods, stuck on problems of grammar or critical thought, stuck in the belief that they have nothing valid or interesting to say (a belief that makes itself come true), stuck in ignorance that language, and especially written language, is exactly what makes educated people "educated" . . . and so the University of San Francisco sees fit to pay me to lead the students out of the woods, by the most expeditious means I can muster, to that meadow where they are on an even footing with all other educated people, all other writers. And the stick that I'm given for prodding the students along is grading.

Do I deserve to wield this authority? No, not particularly. Do I believe in it, pedagogically, philosophically? No, and no. But there it is in the job description, and so I do it. I do it with the self-consciousness of a young parent who catches herself saying, "Because I said so!" and at that moment she hears the voice of hypocrisy, and the tinkling of vows being broken, and the absurdity of finding herself in an age-old role and saying things she thought she'd never ever say. That's me as a grader: I do unto others as was done unto me, and I don't like it any more now than I did when I was on the other side of the desk. One of the biggest challenges for me, then, is to get the students to write as well and as truly as they can for a positive reason -- the desire to develop and exchange ideas -- rather than for a negative reason -- the fear of bad grades.

During my first semester, I was often dismayed, when I returned essays, to see the students flipping quickly to the final page, past all my marginalia and suggestions and exhortations and questions, to the grade I'd settled on; I'd see their moods soar or sink as though I'd evaluated not their essays but their souls. After class they'd come up to me and ask me to calculate their averages, or to assign a little "extra credit" that would help push a C to a B, or they would quibble fervently over the distinction between a B+ and an A-. Didn't they care about becoming truly educated? Didn't they realize how little these grades really mattered? Didn't they care about the meadow? How could I explain to them that I too, as an undergraduate, had been driven by grades, but now I was much older and much wiser and I knew better and so they should too?

It was driving me nuts. This whole grade business was poisoning what I was trying to accomplish in the classroom, and it was undermining the relationship I was trying so hard to establish between students and their ideas. "Writing isn't about grades! Writing is about your mind! Writing is about your life!" Oh, sure, I said all that . . . but the rhino was still back there, as stupid and implacable as ever. Give a student an A -- then she'll be happy to listen to your discourse about the life of the mind.

So, I could simply have given them all A's . . . and for a while there, I was pretty generous as a grader, thinking that this would solve the problem. I didn't give them all A's, of course, but I did try to give grades that wouldn't be so alarming as to distract them from all my hippy-dippy sunshiny visions of the writing life as a spiritual quest. This didn't make a damn bit of difference. If a student has "earned" (whatever that may mean) a C, and you, Professor Nice Guy, give him a C+, he'll bitch and moan that he didn't get a B-, or for that matter an A. In other words, grade inflation does nothing to solve the more fundamental problem of grading: that the practice exists in the first place. Grade inflation just adds another layer to that problem.

It didn't take me long -- less than a semester -- to take Professor Nice Guy back to the store and exchange him for Mr Hard Ass (or rather, Mr Tough-But-Fair). Still, the problem persisted: students were motivated more by grades than by anything else. Then I remembered a section from Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, in which Robert Pirsig's alter ego, "Phaedrus," was teaching writing at Montana State and was troubled by the same issues of grading and pedagogy that were troubling me now. Exasperated by his students' bovine approach to their own educations, Phaedrus decided to continue conducting class and assigning work exactly as he had been doing, but with a key difference: he would evaluate their work and he would record grades, but he would not reveal those grades, not until the end of the semester. A few students, he found, were unnerved by this; all their latent paranoia and low self-esteem rose up in them; they said that withholding grades wasn't "fair," and they became discouraged. A few even quit the class. A few didn't seem to care much one way or the other: A-grade, C-grade, no-grade, it was all the same to them. Most, though, quickly got over the initial strangeness of the new dispensation; they refocused themselves on the substance of their studies, and were delighted at the end of the semester to discover that their grades actually improved.

I decided to try something similar, with modifications appropriate to a different university, a different writing class. The paradigm I wanted to undermine was teacher/student, with its all-but-unavoidable emphasis on evaluation over assessment, product over process. The paradigm I wanted to promote was writer/editor, with its sense of collaborative communication, with its give-and-take carried on over as many drafts and revisions as necessary to make the writer satisfied that she has truly done her damnedest to put an idea across. What I started doing, then, was this: first drafts would be due on a given date, and students who had them on that date would receive a check mark; they would then workshop with one another in class, following models of reader response that we would develop as a group; second drafts would be due the next class, and handed in to me; I would then read and evaluate these drafts, and record grades, but instead of revealing these grades, I would attach memos detailing my responses to each essay; I would return these drafts to the students, who would then have a week to revise their essays in light of my comments and their own second thoughts; they would submit these revisions to me along with memos to me outlining the changes they'd made; I would evaluate and return these second drafts, and only then reveal grades. The idea, I explained, was to model the fact that the writing process isn't just plan-draft-revise, but plan-draft-revise-revise-revise; this is what real writers do. My role in this would be more akin to editor, or coach, than teacher or judge. And of course I had to make revision safe and desirable by promising that grades could only go up, never down, in the succession of drafts.

At first this all seemed very strange to the students, but in fact my experience here was even better than Pirsig's: none of the students rebelled, or became discouraged. By explaining all this in advance I won their cooperation. (No one wanted to find herself in the dummy role of the Pirsig story I told them.) They liked the exchange of memos, which is exhilaratingly novel and adult for most students, and they liked the respectful exchange of ideas. Most of all, they liked the chance to improve their work. I kept repeating this mantra: the real business of writing is rewriting -- that's where serious writers do their work. Many students got so wrapped up in this process that they wanted to continue the exchange of drafts even after receiving grades -- even, in a few cases, after receiving A's. And for nearly all the students, by the time the final drafts came back these writers had become so engaged in their essays that the grades had become . . . well, not irrelevant to them, but at least corralled into a less distracting place.

I can't claim that withholding grades in this way "solves" the problems of motivating students; those problems are embedded in the culture of academia and of culture as a whole, and are enormously beyond the scope of what one teacher can address in one writing class. Lazy students don't become dynamos, stupid students don't become geniuses, scheming students don't become philosophers. But lazy students do become, sometimes at least, a little less lazy, and stupid students do sometimes discover that their stupidity is negotiable, and scheming students find that they at least have to go through the motions of all this process in order to get the grades they want. And that's the whole thing: process, not product. I still have to evaluate student work, and with utopia still over the rainbow I still have to issue grades, but now, for me and for the students too, those grades have a much-diminished significance.

The rhinoceros is asleep.

© Michael Fleming

Berkeley, California

March, 1996

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