TITLE: All Is Done But the Grading
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 21, 2009  7:37 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
The semester is over.  All that remains for us professors
is to grade final exams and turn in course grades.  All
that remains for some students is waiting anxiously for
those grades to hit the record -- or ask for e-mail
notice as soon as the grade is computed.

Writing the software engineering final exam reminded me
how much my ideas about exam-giving have changed over my
many years as a teacher.  Consider this passage from
Lewis Carroll's <EM>Alice</EM>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
'Give your evidence,' said the King; 'and don't be nervous,
or I'll have you executed on the spot.'
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Students often feel like the person hearing the king's
command.  I think back in the old days I secretly felt
like the king, and thought that was good.  I don't feel
that way any more.  I still demand a lot, especially in my
technical courses, but my mindset is less the king's and
more Charles Colton's:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared,
for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man
can answer.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I am much more careful about the questions I ask on
exams now.  If I have any doubts about a question --
what it means, what students might take it to mean,
how it relates to what we have done class -- I try
to re-write it in some way.  Students taking the exam
are working under the constraints of time and nerves,
so it's important that questions be as clear and as
straightforward as possible.

Surely I fail in this at times, but at least now I am
aware of the problem and try to solve it.  In my early
years as a professor, I was probably a bit too cavalier.
I figured that the grades would all work themselves out
in the end.  They always did, but I was forgetting about
something else: the way students experienced the exams.
Those feeling color how students feel about the course,
and even the course's topic, along the way.

I've also changed a bit in how I think about grades.
I have never thought of myself as "giving" grades to
students; I merely assigned the grades that students
earned.  But I was pretty well fixed in how I approached
the earning of grades.  Do the homework, do the assignments,
take the tests -- earn the grade.  I've always been
willing to make course-level adjustments in a due date
or in how I would grade an assignment, in response to
what is happening with me and the students.  I feel
more flexible these days in making individual adjustments,
too, though I can't point think of many specific examples
to serve as evidence that my feeling is warranted.

I do still have some quirks that set my grading apart
from many of my colleague's.  Assignments are due when
they are due.  (I've written about that before.)  I
do not prepare study guides for the class.  (That seems
like the students' job.)  And I don't create gratuitous
extra-credit work at the end of the term for students
who simply didn't do the regularly-assigned work earlier
in the semester.  (That hardly seems fair to the students
who did the work.)  But my mentality is different.  I
have always tried to encourage and reassure students.
Now I try to pay as much attention to the signals I send
implicitly as to my explicit behavior.  Again, I know I
don't always succeed in this, but my students are probably
better off when I'm trying than when I'm oblivious.
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