Who Is the Grader?

The Truth About Your College Grades

Many students believe that their work is judged -- that is, graded -- in ways that are perfectly, ideally fair, and that the grades they receive are an exact and objective reflection of the value of their work, their educations, and themselves. At the other extreme, some students are convinced that their college grades are arbitrary at best and maliciously unjust at worst. Neither of these views is very accurate or very useful, and though they are apparently opposites, they share the same fundamental premise: that grades are assigned, recorded, and forever preserved by a monolithic System, and that any particular grader, whether a professor or a teaching assistant, is merely an instrument of that system.

When students bemoan or rationalize their failures, and exult in their successes, they tend to use terms that are institutional and faceless. Listen to the way we talk about our academic careers: "She graduated from the Yale Law School with Honors." "He flunked that course and had to take it again." "They grade on a curve in that department." Always it's "the University" or "the course" or "the department" or just the ever-handy, ever-culpable "they" who bestow and inflict grades on students. Academia is a giant black box to convert input (student essays, problem sets, and exams) into output (grades, Dean's lists, and diplomas).

Well, take it from someone in the trenches: grading just ain't that way. Beyond the paranoid suspicion of a few students that "the prof is out to get me" (he's not, by the way), most students never consider the very personal element of the grading process. It's really as simple as this: for every grade, there's a grader. This grader is not the institution, not the course or the subject, and definitely not "they." No, the grader is an individual, and this individual is often working under severe and competing pressures. Students who see this fact clearly are well on their way to demystifying academic life. They can enhance their feel and respect for the intellectual community that is a university, and improve their graded academic performance, by understanding how grading really works.

Let's imagine a more or less typical instructor in a more or less typical history department at a more or less typical liberal arts university on the western coast of the United States. She is a teaching assistant in a course on, say, Medieval Politics. The course has been designed by the head of the department, who is also the lecturer and the author of the textbook (required reading, of course). Our T.A. is pursuing her own academic credentials, and a job like this is a normal part of the life of a Ph.D. candidate. Her own specialty may be eighteenth-century women's studies, but she has over the years taken a number of medieval history courses and has done well in them. We'll take it for granted, then, that she's sufficiently qualified to TA this particular course. Her duties are mainly to lead stimulating classroom discussion of the lectures and readings, and also to grade essays and examinations.

All right, then, let's consider her as a grader. There was a mid-term exam today and she's got to have the essays graded by tomorrow morning. She wants to be thorough, scrupulously fair, and would like to use the grading process as an extension of the overall educational process -- more of the same kind of give and take that characterizes the classroom. She wants the students to respect her and to like her. She wants to write two paragraphs of commentary and suggestions for every paragraph in a student essay.

All this takes time, time, time . . . and time is definitely not on her side. The professor wants to get his results in quickly to the Dean's Office. The students are anxious to get their grades. She needs to make progress on her own research (a dissertation on feminist writers in eighteenth-century Italy), in order for her to secure a grant to pursue her studies again next year. She has an appointment with her advisor in two days, and she's supposed to have a chapter ready by then.

She makes relatively little money, and has to keep reminding herself that she's doing all this for . . . well, for what? Love? Intellectual curiosity? A heroic desire to pass on the spark of historical inquiry to the next generation of scholars? A pointy-headed ego-trip? Along with the confusion in her heart there's also the dark fear that this college life is all just a useless grind and that she's only an academic because she lacks the will and the imagination to go out and do anything else. What if she's just drifting along from high school to college to grad school, forever reliving the pattern of a life that has not changed in any essential way since kindergarten, forever avoiding adulthood? What if all those people are right when they speak of "the real world" as something Out There, a place beyond the quaint, artificial certainties of university life?

So there she is, trying to balance her idealism with her doubts and fears and all kinds of pressures. It's ten o'clock p.m., and mid-term grades have to be in tomorrow morning at nine. On the desk in front of her is a stack of fifty examination blue books. The mid-term prompt -- that is, the test's essay question -- was this: "Compare and contrast feudal political organization in England and France during the fourteenth century." Ugh. She would never have chosen this topic herself, but it was the professor's decision, not hers.

With a heavy heart she flips open the first exam booklet. She reads a few paragraphs and realizes that the student has pursued only half the topic; he has compared (found similarities), but completely failed to contrast (to find differences). In other words, he has performed only half the task. Reluctantly she gives him a B-minus. The next student goes into some detail in describing medieval life in England, but there's nothing, not a word, about medieval France. The essay misses the point of the topic altogether. C-minus. Now here's one in which the student writes fairly well and discusses the topic intelligently, but without any supporting detail or examples at all she can't see giving any grade higher than a B-plus.

And so on down the stack. She's trying her hardest to remain as fair and as fresh as when she began, but after thirty essays and three cups of coffee certain things are starting to get to her. She has seen "medieval" spelled m-e-d-e-i-v-a-l so many times now that she has to resist the urge to give the next miscreant an instant and irrevocable F. She has completely lost her patience with feeble attempts at humor, with final paragraphs ended abruptly with the words OUT OF TIME. More than one student has tried to take a chummy, intimate tone with phrases like "you know" and "hey, but that's history for you." They get C's for their trouble, as do the bullshit artists who think that "socio-economic transnationalism" and "heuristical hermeneutics" can cover up for a lack of anything clear and concrete to say. A few students try to smuggle in irrelevant viewpoints and political opinions from the present day that do nothing to illuminate the topic; she has to grade them down for this. Some of the essays are leaden with cliches like "the whole ball of wax" and "it was an uphill battle" and of course "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

She grimaces at the ploys of some students: two-inch margins, double spacing, appeals to bogus authority such as Time magazine. A few students have made misguided attempts at learned-sounding allusions to art or to literature, getting them all wrong. One student is due for a visit to the Dean. His paper is a hopeless jumble of meaningless, meandering phrases like "at that particular juncture of time," except for one long paragraph that is quite elegantly constructed and worded, and looks strangely familiar. . . . She reaches for the professor's textbook, and sure enough, there in the introductory chapter is the same paragraph, word for word, and even the same transposition of "from" into "form." Don't they know that she's seen it all before, that she was a student for years before she was a grader?

As the main stack dwindles, a small pile grows beside it, made up of essays set aside for special distinction. These are the A papers. Many of them have the cue words "compare and contrast" underlined, as well as the principal topic words: "England," "France," "feudal political organization", and "fourteenth century." Many have a cluster map or a rudimentary outline on the back page; obviously these students organized their time well. A few have titles, though this isn't necessary on an exam. The essays are no-nonsense -- they get right to the point, and they are written clearly in standard academic language, with neither flowery phrases on the one hand, nor street slang on the other. The structures are simple because the students understand the brevity required by this kind of writing. The paragraphs are well-developed, with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. Most of the essays are not particularly long, but neither are they ridiculously short. Though the handwriting quality varies, even the worst is quite legible. There may be a few grammatical errors and misspellings here and there, and a few cross-outs and false starts; she doesn't care about that. There are no jokes, impassioned excuses, doodles, or anything else inappropriate scrawled in the margins.

And what about content? It so happens that these A papers take quite a variety of different approaches and come up with different answers, some of which are completely at variance with one another. Still, there are some common features. They all cover the topic with as much thoroughness and thoughtfulness as can be hoped for in one hour. They are logical; they move with assurance from point to point in a way that builds up to a strong conclusion. Each writer has the confident tone of someone who delivers exactly what he knows of the factual material, and exactly what he really believes in where judgements are called for; none of these essayists is playing the game of trying to guess what it is that the grader wants to hear. She would like every essay to be like this. She would like to give every student an A.

Why has she set these papers aside? Well, they make her feel proud of herself as a teacher. She can look at that A stack, however tall or short it might be, and think, Yes, this is what it's all about, this is why I stay here. Tomorrow morning she'll show the best ones to her colleagues, perhaps even read a few of the best passages aloud. And then the grades will go to the Dean's office, and the students will be able to pick up the exams, and a few of them will come to her and point at their blue books and moan "but you know what I mean!" or "My mom'll kill me!" or "You just want to keep people like me down."

All she can say is that she did her best to be fair. She doesn't bother to tell them that they should have studied, they should have done all the reading, they should have showed up for class. In a couple of years, she knows, they'll have forgotten her anyway; they'll blame all their failures on the college, or on "the system," whatever that means. She knows this, and she doesn't much care. It is enough that she has done her job conscientiously. She just wouldn't be able to live with herself otherwise.

© Michael Fleming

Berkeley, California

October, 1991

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