4 Days, 40 Papers

Forty papers, each two or three pages long (typewritten, 12-point type and double-spaced, as per my instructions) sit neatly stacked in two piles on my desk in my home. They stare accusingly at me, but they’ll not get my attention until I’m finished writing this post, watering my lone plant, and bundling yesterday’s newspapers and magazines for tomorrow’s recycling. The papers arrived yesterday, like little ships docking in the harbor of my hand — tenderly steered to me by students with tired-looking faces.

This semester, I’m teaching in a large lecture course that’s for first-year students in our Honors College. The course is team-taught — 12 of us developed the curriculum, and we each give a couple of lectures as well as teach two separate discussion groups of 20 students each. We’re at the moment in the course where I’ve finally learned everyone’s name, my students no longer seem shy, and discussions are sustained and closely focused on the text. In other words, things are going well.  One might even go further—this is, after all, the glorious season of spring in an academic course, where hope rules and disappointment has yet to rear its ugly little head.

This is not the first essay I’ve assigned to my students, but it’s the first one that I am grading. (By the way, because both discussion groups discuss the same questions, I confidently assign the same essay to both groups.) In the first little essay, students learned that when it comes to form, Professor Fendrich goes at their writing like one of those wickedly ruthless The New Yorker copy editors from the 1940s — the kind who never left a word unquestioned or a phrase untouched. My students, reeling from the complete book written on top of their little essays, meticulously revised and returned to me a revision of that first little effort that reflected my every correction and suggested alteration. All they saw was a check, check-minus and check-plus — my way of saying, “OK,” “You’re going to have some problems,” or, “You write good essays.” Now, however, it’s time for an actual grade.

Since I’m a firm believer that justice (meting out what is deserved) delayed is justice denied, and that rough though it may be, grades are a form of justice, I intend to have these papers read and graded by Monday. What follows is a list of the steps I’ll take in reading and grading my two piles of student papers (which at this point are beginning to reproach me more forcefully than when I first began writing this post).

1.  First, I should mention that I instructed my students to write their name in the upper right hand corner of their papers. I will now dog-ear this corner so that I don’t know whose paper I’m reading when I’m reading it.

2.  I’ll do a quick read of all forty essays. (Truth in advertising: I already did step 1 and 2 last night, so eager was I to see if the writing had improved after the first little essay.) When I say quick, I mean quick — perhaps 10 minutes total. I form a visual impression of the lengths of paragraphs, and do a cursory read of several randomly selected opening paragraphs — ferreting out the topic sentence, in particular. I get a feel for the number of direct quotations from the text, and I do a very fast read of about five or six conclusions.

3.  I randomly choose three essays from each of my two sections. These I read with care.

4.  I divide the papers of each section into two stacks of 10 essays. I then execute my game plan, which is to read no more than 10 essays in a day. This will permit me to return these essays to students in four days. I spend about 10 minutes reading, correcting, and making comments on each page, which means it will take me between 20 and 30 minutes to read each of these 2-3 page essays.

6. I tackle the essays in groups of two or three at a time, forcing myself to get up and do something else for 10 or 20 minutes before moving onto the next group. At this point, I don’t grade the papers. Instead, I place them in three groups of “best,” “worst,” and “middle.” “Best” really means best, and “worst” really means worst; hence middle is the largest pile.

7.  After I’ve read all the essays, I re-examine those in the “best” and “worst” piles.” I move into the middle any that don’t belong. The club of the “best” only makes sense if it is extremely exclusive — and it is.

8.  I then divide the middle pile into “best,” “worst” and “middle.” At this point, I judge where an essay belongs mostly by reading my own comments that appear at the end of each essay. After all, these sum up my overall assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.

9.  After essays have been settled into the piles where in my judgment they belong (yes, grading amounts to rough justice, and subjectivity plays a part in all of this), I assign grades.  Before I actually physically write them on the essays, however, I double-check the grades in the two sections. Do they match up — i.e., does a grade of “B+” in one section approximate the quality of an essay with that grade in the other?

Final note: Because this particular course consists of Honors students, I rarely encounter poor essays. Generally, the worst essays are average, and I assign them a grade of “C” accordingly. Even so, should any of my students read this post, please know that even though it’s no fun to give out a poor grade, my grades are my integrity. They are the means by which I tell the truth as I see it. If I’m any good at all, it’s the way most others who know something about the subject matter would see it as well.