Unobjective Grading

Today I finished grading my students' first major essays this semester. One practice I find useful, if slightly more time-consuming, is giving as many complimentary comments on an assignment as critical ones. With the "cream of the crop" essays, I really don't have to try; for the rest, I usually write all of my harsh comments first, since those are at the forefront of my mind, and then go back and look for things that they did well (however minuscule in importance).

There's a very practical reason for this: student evals. When I tried this the first time, I received very high marks for "usefulness of feedback". The next semester, curious to see what would happen, I didn't bother to equalize comments. Student evaluation of "usefulness" dropped 10% (most categories only showed a 1-2% difference between the two semesters). So the following semester, I returned to marking complimentary points. Again, student evals in this category went way up.

So I'm doing it again for the third time. But what I noticed today is rather disconcerting, if important to recognize. When I took the time to reread the essays and look for good points, after making critical comments, my assessment of the essays themselves improved. Papers that I originally thought should be graded at around a "D" made it into the C and even B ranges; no paper was less than a "C", IIRC. The only exceptions were the papers that I didn't need to try to mark well--my original assessments of them remained.

The relative rankings of the essays remained the same: those that I first assessed as deserving of a higher grade I still assess as such, and those originally assessed as deserving a lower grade still deserve one. But the actual grades themselves have shifted upwards.

If my observation is accurate, then I think I owe it to my students to look for the positives every time. Otherwise, I might be allowing a "teacher's predisposition towards the negative"--a sort of critical set of blinders--to deprive the students of their full earned grade.

I'm sure that what all you teachers out there want to hear is that you need to spend more time grading. But saving time grading is a subject for another post.

Happy grading!