Another Day at the Grade Inflation Factory

Hm. This is retirement, eh? Interesting experience.

So I started grading 50,000 words of student efforts after breakfast this morning, right around 7:00 a.m. Racing along as fast as I could read, making no comments except for a few overall observations attached to the electronic rubrics I post in the terrifying BlackBoard, I finished sometime after 3:00 p.m. That would be eight (count’em, 8 ) uninterrupted hours of grading.

Then their scores had to be entered in the rubric forms, each of which has 20 items, and each had to be added up for this assignment’s total number of points.

Thence to Blackboard. Oh god.

It took an hour and 45 minutes to enter all the points for all the students and then upload all the forms to all the students through BlackBoard’s arcane communication system. It is soooo…slooooowwwwwwwwww.

It took another 45 minutes fill in zeros for all the assignments that students didn’t bother to do, to copy out their total numeric scores, to compare each one to the grade equivalences, and to figure their letter grades.

None of this was helped when FireFox developed a hitch in its pants and decided it would not, no way, NOT enter anything in the ever-aggravating BlackBoard. So I had to go over to Safari, which is OK but slightly more cumbersome to use. No degree of extra cumbersomeness was in any way welcome at that particular moment.

If you are a parent of one of my students, you’ll be pleased to know that all our children are above average. What we have here, in the afternoon section, are 12 As, 4 Bs, 4 Cs, 1 D, and 1 F.

How, you ask, could so many young geniuses cluster in one classroom? Well…obviously, birds of a feather flock together!

In the community colleges, large numbers of students drop. At the first whiff of a D or F (or, among the most ambitious, of a C), the young things shoot out the door like frightened cottontails. After these clear out, the students who have a shot at success remain in the classroom.

Then we have all the devices designed to get them to show up in class. Understand, many of these students are bright enough young men and women who, at the age of 19 or so, haven’t imbibed the best of all possible learning skills. One learning skill is, as you might imagine, showing up in class. To get them there and to address the attention-deficit problem (they can’t stay awake through a full hour of lecture), I fill the days with interminable in-class activities and exercises, each of which racks up 10 points here and 20 points there. Plus, because we’re required to keep roll, they get one point for sitting in a seat and breathing—36 points (for this section) shows the young scholar surfaced in class every day.

Because I’m required to assign only three major papers in English 102, that is all I do assign. So…that’s only 300 points.  By the time the semester ends, the total number of points including the three papers and the drafts and the peer reviews and the quizzes and all the exercises and doohickies adds up to something between 650 and 800 points. For this section, the total possible points came to 766. Thus over half the available points consist of busy-work and breathing exercises.

Consequently, even a kid who can’t write his way out of a paper bag can get a B in this class, if he (okay, or she) bothers to turn in the papers. To get a C, you have to cut class with some regularity; to get a D you have to work very hard to prove your incompetence, and to get an F, you have to be brain-dead. Really, when you think about it a D is a greater accomplishment than an A, because it reflects a great deal more effort.

I hate this. In the first place, I hate flunking students, some of whom do try very hard but are just not up to snuff. And in the second place I hate handing out A’s like Hallowe’en candy.

One of the things you should know about these students is that most of them are pretty bright. Some are very smart, indeed. If they’re not great at academics, it’s because they’re distracted by other concerns, because the state of Arizona’s K-12 system leaves much to be desired, or because they haven’t the temperament or patience to sit through interminable mind-numbing courses.

The best student writer I ever had the privilege to meet got a gentleman’s C in my course. OMG, could that guy write! Given half a chance and a degree from Princeton, he could give John McPhee a real run for his money. So…how come he didn’t get an A in freshman comp? He told me he simply could not bear to sit still through an hour or 90 minutes of class. He said that when he had tried, he would feel so restless and so antsy it made him physically uncomfortable.

True to form, he cut a fair number of class meetings, and he flat refused to jump through the busy-work hoops I’d set up to insure that as many students as humanly possible would rack up enough points to pass the course. Last I saw of him, he was on his way to fight fires in Montana. He promised to take a journal along and think about writing articles or essays about his experiences.

This was a man that…well, any young woman in her right mind would fall all over herself to land him as a husband. If we were still living in the cave, he would be bringing home the mammoth steaks for us all. And he also would be keeping the peace in the clan: he was a natural leader. The course, in the first place, wasn’t challenging enough for him, and in the second place, the classroom experience asked him to do something he wasn’t really suited for.

The next time I teach this course, there’ll some changes made! We’re required to assign two 750-word papers and one 2,500-word paper to the 102 classes. Twenty-five hundred words is more than three times the length of each shorter paper, and so next time around, I’m going to make that gigantic hunk of a paper worth 300 points. That will devalue all the in-class activities, so that assiduous presence and faithful hoop-jumping will not, of themselves, carry one through to a passing grade.

In addition to that, they’re starting the semester with annotated bibliographies. They. WILL. Learn. A. Style. Manual. If. It. Kills. Us. All. This activity will occupy great wads of time and also will give them a running head start on their research paper.

Next semester we’re using the “Assignments” function in BlackBoard, which (if I’m informed correctly) speeds the exchange of papers, automatically creates a grade column in the online gradebook, flags you when one of the li’l thangs has submitted a paper, and enters your grade when you’re finished reading the thing. This will speed matters along to some degree.

It also appears that BB will let you enter a letter grade instead of a numeric score and, possibly, create a running averaged letter grade for each classmate. If I can figure out how to make that work, then next fall we’ll be reverting to my old, unreconstructed SchoolMarm Grading System, whereby each hapless student starts with 100 points and gets two to six points dinged off for each crime and misdemeanor that I have told them (a thousand times!) not to do. This, oh fellow pedagogues out there, is an effective way to teach students grammar, style, thematic organization, paragraphing, and sentence structure, theories to the contrary notwithstanding. By the end of the semester, they’re all writing coherent copy with very few grammatical, punctuation, and style errors. It also has the advantage of letting you see their equivalent letter grade at a glance.

If university juniors and seniors who are mostly transfers from the junior colleges can do that, I’ll bet junior-college freshmen and sophomores can do it, too. You have to work with them, but you can get almost all of them to that level, with a few LD and ESL exceptions.

The Eng. 101 students got off too easy, too, though their grades were not quite so skewed to the higher range. Next semester, all four of their papers will be researched, including the two little Mickey Mousers that are not so required by the district. They also will start out with a cold plunge into MLA style, and in fact, I’m going to make them buy the MLA Manual, a great improvement over the half-baked composition textbooks we have in hand. I’m also going to make them learn Strunk & White, which I probably can’t make them buy but which I sure as hell can make them read online. In all its sexist pre-1970s glory.

The little pistols are going to come out of 101 knowing how to write a bibliography and enter an in-text citation, and, not only that, knowing how to write tight. And what a pronoun antecedent is. Maybe even what a subject and a verb are.

They are going to do a lot more work, and I am going to do a lot less work.