For about 15 years I have been arguing that professors shouldn’t grade their own students (see “Simple Change 1” in “Universities and Economic Growth” from 2009, for example). The original idea was to fight against the natural corruption of professors overestimating their own efficacy as teachers.
Now that the U.S. has entered the universal Age of Victimhood, at least on campus, this article from The Nation gives some more weight to my idea:
Last fall, David Samuel Levinson, the author, most recently, of the literary thriller Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, taught a course called “Introduction to Fiction” at Emory University, part of a two-year fellowship he’d been awarded there. Blunt and scabrous, he prides himself on being frank with his students. “My class is like a truth-telling, soothsaying class, and I tell them no one is going to talk to you like this, you will never have another class like this,” he says.
One student, he says, a freshman woman, sat besides him throughout the course, actively participating. At the end of the semester, he gave her a B+, because, although she worked hard, her writing wasn’t great. “They don’t really understand that they can do all of the work, and turn in perfectly typed up, typo-free papers and stories, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to get an A, because quality matters, talent matters,” he says.
While he was on vacation over winter break, he got a Facebook message from her. He ignored it, figuring it was a complaint about her grade. She started sending him imploring e-mails asking him to reconsider her B+. Finally, he says, he got an e-mail from the director of his program saying, “You need to take care of this. You don’t want this to escalate.”
The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. …
If any two people who interact face-to-face on a university campus can bring career-ending charges, it doesn’t seem as though there is any way for traditional (in the U.S.; many other countries use impartially administered exams) grading to work.
Related:
I think it’s a fine proposal, but would say that society currently demands more corruption in these matters, not less.
Years ago, I worked a couple of summers for Pearson Educational Measurement as an essay exam scorer. We would get huge batches of student essay exams, all answering the same question, read them, and grade them based on established criteria. Unless a student wrote it into their essay, all personally-identifiable information was removed, so we had no idea whose essays we were grading. Selected essays were graded twice, by two different people, to help keep everyone calibrated to the criteria. (I.e., if you and I graded the same essay differently, then at least one of us was ostensibly wrong, and might be grading other essays incorrectly as well.)
It seems monotonous on the surface, but I found it fairly enjoyable work. It would be harder to implement for most college classes, as the exams aren’t standardized across schools, and there would be different grading criteria for each class/school/whatever.
Even if, though, this en masse batch processing approach wouldn’t work, I see no reason that college exams couldn’t be scored remotely by people with no connection to the school. There are probably a lot of underemployed PhD-types out there who wouldn’t mind taking on some part-time, remote work in academia…
“If any two people who interact face-to-face on a university campus can bring career-ending charges…”
“If a woman who interacts face-to-face on a university campus with anyone else can bring career-ending charges…”
There, I fixed it for you.