Report on Grading Differently

By Brian Croxall. At the beginning of the semester, I wrote about an experiment that I had underway to grade differently. To recap, I told my students that I would only give “straight” letter grades on the essays that they would write in my first-year writing class—no pluses, no minuses. My reasons for taking this approach were, as I explained, to lighten the feelings of conflict that I get when grading essays that fall between the margin of grades. As I wrote then, “My thinking behind this decision is that while it might be hard to know the difference between an 87 and an 88, or sometimes even between the dreaded B+/A- split, I absolutely do know the difference between an A and a B paper. I expect to see a sharp drop in the amount of stress that I feel as I grade the four essays I’m assigning this semester.” Read more...