- I constantly second-guess my judgment. Having a rubric makes things even worse: for each item on the rubric, I labor over the point total. “Does this student deserve a 2 or a 1.5 for the “ethos” section of their rhetorical analysis? Can I give it a 1.75? If I give a 1.5, what will that do to the total score? Maybe I didn’t teach this section well enough,. So-and-so is going to be so sad when she sees this grade,” etc. Davidson picks up on this with her hypothetic al musing, “Is this an A-- or a B++?" It’s funny because it’s true. It’s not funny because it’s true.
- This second-guessing makes grading take FOREVER (along with the commentary I offer, which is a good thing). Student projects on average take over 30 minutes each to grade, sometimes 45 minutes to an hour. That means the entire process can take days to get through, depending on how distracted I am.
- The amount of time I spend on grading leads to a sort of “self-loathing.” I get frustrated with myself, I get frustrated with the assignment I designed, I get frustrated by the fact that all of my work is going to get put off and I will have to scramble and compromise.
At any rate, the idea of “crowd-sourcing” grading to students in the class seems idealistic yet very alluring. I have my students analyze their peers’ work all the time. For every project, they do peer review. Sometimes I even say, “if you were going to give this paper a grade as it is right now, what would that grade be?” But in the end, students get points for participating in peer review, and their reviewers comments may be completely disregarded. Sometimes students sense this, and thus, the quality of their commentary decreases. However, when their peers actually have a say in determining the quality of their work for an assessment, suddenly the stakes are much higher. I think Davidson is correct in pointing out that students will work harder and be more critical of their work if their peers are judging it. But additionally, those actually reviewing the work will take their job seriously if it has real, tangible effects.
I don’t know how this would all work in a literature class, though. Davidson’s class is student-led, but I feel like we can’t completely eradicate the presence of the “expert” in the classroom (ideally that presence is the instructor). When we are teaching skills such as close-reading and textual analysis, can we shoulder the responsibility of assessment off on the students? Can we give students credit for just completely the work satisfactorily? I feel like nuance is important in literary critique; therefore, Davidson’s model may not fit too well in the literature classroom.
However, I have witnessed an alternative form of grading that does not necessarily solve MY problem of second-guessing my evaluative decisions, but does address Davidson’s concern about the meaningfulness of assigning grades. When I took the Digital Humanities seminar with Dr. Julie Thompson Klein, she required her students to participate in their assessment. After any major project, or at midterm regarding weekly student blogs, Julie corresponded with us via email. We had to answer series of questions which asked us to evaluate the quality of work we had done for her, essentially arguing for an “A” (or being honest and deflating that grade if we felt that was appropriate). Then we had to give ourselves a grade. We would send the assessment back to Julie and she would respond with her own comments on our performance and her estimation of the grade we had given ourselves. We were then free to correspond back and forth until we had reached an agreement. I had never seen grading done like this, but it was satisfying to know Julie took my input into account. Not only did she provide a LOT of commentary on my projects, she took the time to have conversations where grades could be negotiated. This process might actually alleviate some of my anxiety which causes me to second-guess myself. However, I imagine this process might take even longer. I wonder if there is a way to adapt this system to help it meet my needs.