Monday, October 1, 2012

Charity and grading

Quick note after having done a bunch of grading today: To grade student papers well, one needs to combine an ability to read very charitably with an ability to see how the paper could be read uncharitably.

1 comment:

Dagmara Lizlovs said...

You must also be careful of the topic you assign to your students. When I was in my freshman humanities class for engineering students at the University of Michigan in 1978, the young female professor assigned us to write about topics from Lucretious's "The Nature of Things". The class was about 99% male with me and maybe one or two other students as the only coeds. You can guess what all the males wrote about. What else would guys that age write about? Though the female prof took it all in stride, I wonder how she went about grading those papers! :-)