All Posts Tagged With: "grading"

These things annoy Prof. Pettigrew far more

Photo courtesy of Sergey Vladimirov on Flickr

Last week I wrote that banning bottled water from universities was environmentally sensitivity gone too far. I hinted that there were other things much worse, and if we are going to start banning things, water should be way down on our list. Just to show that I am not entirely a spoil-sport when it comes to forbidding things, I offer 10 other things that I would rather see disappear.

1. Cheap cologne. While cheap perfume for women seems to be on the decline, cheap cologne for men seems to be making a comeback. Bottom line: I don’t want to smell you. Period.

2. Asking a professor where another professor is or when another professor will be back. It’s always the same: student arrives at Professor Hallcross’s door and knocks. No answer. Knocks again. No answer. Comes to my door: “do you know where Professor Hallcross is?” No. How would I know? Do you think we professors have some kind of universal academic GPS? Do you think I have a magic map showing his footprints moving through the Hufflepuff common room?

3. Non-specific email help requests. EG: “I don’t understand the assignment you gave us. Can you explain it?” No, because I don’t know what course you are in, which assignment you mean, or what part of it you don’t understand.

4. Pretending you didn’t know plagiarism was wrong. You cheated. You got caught. At least own up to it.

5. Walking in large groups slowly down the hall. Some of us have places to be. And for that matter, don’t you have somewhere to be? The library? Class?

6. Doing homework from one class in another class. You’re missing my thoughtful comments on Oscar Wilde, and I’m distracting you from memorizing brain anatomy. Why bother?

7. Asking what you need to do to pass the course after the course is more than half over. Think back to the beginning of class and you’ll recall that I told you what to do to pass the course…

8. Asking for a higher grade so that you can keep your scholarship or get into a program you want to get into. Those scholarship and admissions committees rely on me to let them know how you’ve done. If I raise your grade to the line they have set, it defeats the purpose of the line.

9. Bird courses. If there’s no way a student can try hard and still fail, then it’s not a serious course. This is mostly the fault of professors, but hey students, don’t feed the birds! Challenge yourselves.

10. Asking your course adviser which profs are the “good” ones. I don’t know what you think a good prof is. Do you mean funny? Conscientious? Easy grader? And even if I did know what you were looking for, I don’t see other professors in the classroom. Most times I don’t know if they’re what you’re looking for. Even if I did, I’m not going to bad mouth my colleagues. Well, except one.

Once we’ve gotten rid of all these things, then you can talk to me about water.

Printer? Who needs a printer?

This past year, I took on another bold experiment: papers without paper. I got the results I expected, and found some advantages that I hadn’t.

You might think that printed papers were long gone, but they have endured despite their inherent difficulties. The process of working with paper essays is complex enough when things go right, but aggravating when they don’t: your printer is out of ink. Then you can’t find your professor, so you put it under his door, only to learn later that his office has a rug and your paper has been lodged under said rug for two weeks. And when he does finally hand it back, you happen to not be in class, so you don’t get it back anyway. You see the point. We need something simpler.

And all that paper adds up. Consider ENGL 200, the intro to lit course here at Cape Breton University. There are typically five or six sections of this course offered annually with around 40 students per section. That’s minimally 200 students who write five papers a year. Let’s say each paper averages five pages in length (probably more given Works Cited pages and so on). So each student produces 25 pieces of paper, times 200 students, that works out to a cool 5000 pieces of paper annually. That’s only one course at just one small university.

So paperless grading offers an obvious advantage from the start. It saves reams of paper.

But does it simplify the process? Colleagues at other universities warned me that online assignments would introduce too many complexities. They and their students have to navigate a complex online system with passwords and formatting and what-not.

But I decided to avoid all that and keep it simple. Students just e-mail the assignment to me directly. I evaluate it with notes added via MS Word, save the thing in PDF format and send it back. It really is simple, all things considered.

But it is the other consequences of grading electronically that I find most interesting.

For one thing, I think my electronic feedback is better than my old hand written scribbles in the margins of papers. Unlike my handwritten scrawl, my typing is clear and legible, and since I’m not scrambling to fit in what I want to say into a few inches, I can provide fuller explanations. In some cases, I even provide web links to other sites that provide more information on grammar or history that’s relevant.

Further, since I can edit my own comments, I can stop and rephrase a comment when I didn’t like the original wording I had chosen. On paper, I was sort of stuck with it.

Another advantage is that even after I send the paper back to the student, I retain a copy for my records. That way, if a students turns up at the end of the year saying she did five papers but only got credit for four, I can check my email folders to see if and when the paper came in. Similarly, I can check to see if it was graded and what the grade was and so on. After all, mistakes can happen, but this way they can be easily corrected.

I am also toying with the notion of taking examples from old student papers and using them in next year’s class as instances of common errors. I cover common errors now but I think they might be more convincing if students can see that the error was committed by a real student. Of course, I would remove the original student’s name and any identifying information.

On the down side, my grading has to be done on a computer.  It also means that throughout most of the year I have large numbers of papers in my inbox waiting to be graded — and I’m one of those people who lives to have his inbox empty.

So clearly, in addition to the joys of paperless grading, there are some terrors. These terrors are why some colleagues say they will never go paperless. Me? I will never go back.

Legal action threatened after students’ marks lowered by admin

A University of Alberta math professor is threatening legal action to reinstate his students’ grades after his department lowered them without his support. When Mikhail Kovalyov informed his students what had happened, and encouraged them to appeal their grades, he was asked to resign.

Back in May, Kovalyov received an email from an associate chair in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences informing him that grades for his first year math course had been lowered, resulting in a change in class average from 2.16 to 1.79 on a 4.0 scale. Other sections of the same course had averages that ranged from 2.13 to 2.95, according to documentation obtained by Maclean’s. The math professor says that he had already failed over 20 per cent of the class before these changes were approved.

University guidelines suggest an approximate mean average of 2.62 for first-year courses, with only six per cent of the class failing.

When faculty services officer David McNeilly, who is also responsible for reviewing final grades, first proposed the changes to Kovalyov in April, he explained in an email that the department’s proposed grades for Kovalyov’s class were “more generous than the typical exam cutoffs.”  He also pointed out that in Fall 2009, the department failed 29 per cent of students in one section of the class. “In particular, we are being consistent,” McNeilly wrote.

Kovalyov responded to McNeilly that if so many extra students deserve to fail, then they should never have passed and received credit for math courses in the previous semester. “If we were consistent, all these students would have never made [it] through” the prerequisites, he wrote.

Related: Students speak out on UAlberta case

‘there doesn’t seem much point to professors handing out grades at all’

A 65 page document prepared by Kovalyov for the board of governors in August, outlining the events of the dispute, includes an expanded explanation from McNeilly why the grades were lowered. In particular, Kovalyov supposedly awarded too many B grades compared to C and D grades, even if the overall class average was not excessively high.

Kovalyov says he always outlines his marking policy to students at the beginning of the term. “By doing this, they made my words to students worthy of nothing,” he wrote in an email to Maclean’s.  “I am certainly one of those less respectable professors who can be told to lower their grades.”

Shortly after learning of the changes to his grades, Kovalyov emailed his students and encouraged them to appeal. “Should any one of you [choose] to complain, I will try to assist as much as I can within the law and regulations” he wrote. He also called the department’s actions “disgusting.”

Despite warnings from administrators that taking his case directly to students is “inappropriate,” Kovalyov sent two additional emails to students, in which he called the actions of the departmental administration “a crime of forgery.”

Those messages to students did not sit well with university brass and in July Kovalyov was informed by department chair Arturo Pianzola that he was being relieved of his teaching duties.

In a letter explaining the decision, Pianzola says that the “contents” of the emails Kovalyov sent to students “disparage administration” and contain “unfounded and inappropriate,” allegations.

A formal complaint was also filed against Kovalyov by the dean of science, Gregory Taylor, as well as  Pianzola, stating that Kovalyov’s actions were “unbecoming” of a senior professor. The letter accuses Kovalyov of “Undermining student confidence” in the grade appeal process and “Engaging in insubordination.” An email Kovalyov sent to an administrator where he referenced Joseph Stalin’s purges from the 1920s and 1930s was also cited in the complaint against him.

In late November, Kovalyov, who has taught at the university for more than 20 years, was offered a deal in exchange for his resignation. Under the proposed arrangement the university would continue to pay his full salary until March 2011, followed by a lump sum payout in April equivalent to 15 months pay. He turned down the offer.

Instead, Kovalyov wants phased pre-retirement where he would continue to provide partial duties until 2013 when he was originally suppose to retire. He has been consulting with the faculty association on how best to proceed.

Kovalyov said that while he finds the disciplinary actions of the university unfair, he no longer sees much of a future for himself at the U of A. “Even if this matter is settled, something else will come up,” he said.

Kovalyov’s battle with administrators over grades go back to at least 2009, when he says grade averages were lowered for two sections he taught of a first-year math course. He  has also been embroiled in a similar dispute regarding a third-year course.

The university has declined comment on the case, and attempts to contact other professors in the department, as well as several of Kovalyov’s students, were not responded to.

Vice-president provost (apologies, the editors) academic Colleen Skidmore did agree to address grading policy in general terms. She explained that the grades set by instructors are unofficial until approved by the chair of the professor’s respective department. “It is the chair, or the dean, that has the responsibility for ultimately deciding what the final grade is,” she said.

Photo: Getty Images

It’s not a gift, and you don’t get points for being old, young, pretty or ugly

Once, sitting with some colleagues in the faculty lounge, conversation turned to a woman who was about to graduate from our university at the decidedly non-traditional age of 75. During this conversation, it was revealed by a grinning fellow professsor that the student in question had failed one of my courses.

“You failed a 75-year-old woman?” someone said incredulously.

“Well, in my own defence,” I replied, “she was only 72 when she took my course.”

I was proud of this bon mot, but my witticism concealed a more serious issue. What is a grade?

Many students, and some professors too, think of a grade as a kind of gift received in a kind of quiet exchange. The student provides attendance and assignments and, in an act of reciprocity, the professor offers a grade. The finer the one gift, the finer the gift given in return. This notion is reinforced by the language we use: “Professor Zeitz gave me a decent grade on my paper, but I don’t know why it wasn’t higher.”

The danger of this view of grading is that it implies that grades are distributed on the personal whim of the instructor. Thus, a student who receives a low grade can shrug it off because, in her mind, it is the malice of the instructor that is to blame. I have literally heard students make precisely this kind of complaint: “I got a lousy grade in his class. I don’t know why he doesn’t like me.” Even worse, when a student gets a grade that is close to the passing level, he cannot understand why Professor Wong just won’t give him a few extra points.

To my mind, however, a grade is not a gift. It is an assessment. It is an expert evaluation of the quality of work done for a particular assignment or on a particular test. It is not personal, and while there is no such thing as absolute objectivity, the grade should be based on clearly stated criteria which are, in turn, based on the expectations of the scholarly discipline in question. Nothing else matters. You don’t get points for being old, or young, or pretty, or ugly, or because you are on the basketball team. You don’t lose points for any of those things, either. And while a professor may reasonably tweak a final grade if she feels the student’s arithmetical score does not precisely match her success in the course, the question is still a simple if not easy one: to what extent did the student demonstrate a mastery of the course material?

This is why, to my mind, it is unethical for a professor to raise a grade simply to let a student get admitted to a graduate program, or keep a scholarship, or stay on a sports team. Those scholarship rules, and required averages, and team regulations are all there for a reason. And if professors raise the grades without academic justification, the grades become meaningless at best, misleading at worst. If those who are paying out scholarship funds demand an 80% average, and a prof helps a student keep that scholarship without having really earned it, that prof has colluded with the student in committing a kind of fraud because the student is taking money on false pretenses. If a sports league requires its players to pass all their courses, the prof who passes athletes just so they can play, is helping the team cheat. Such profs are cooking the academic books in much the same way crooked accountants fudge numbers in corporate backrooms.

People sometimes ask if I fail many students.  I reply that I never fail students, but sometimes, unfortunately, I am duty bound to bear witness to their failure. Even if they are 72.

You think writing papers is tough? Try grading them

Sitting on my desk are this year’s first piles of student papers waiting to be graded. But I’m not grading them. Instead, I’m writing this blog entry about why I dislike grading papers.

Many people assume that grading papers is the worst thing about being a professor. They are right, but for the wrong reason. People think it’s onerous because, as they often say to me, “some of them must be so bad.” And some of them are bad, but those aren’t the ones that make marking such a chore; in fact, really bad papers are almost a pleasure to grade because at least they get me excited — if only by rage.

No, the worst papers are the papers that populate the vast, bland wasteland of mediocrity. They are not good, mind you, and they are not bad. They are, to adapt Wolfgan Pauli’s famous quip, not even bad. They make no huge blunders, but they don’t say anything either. They are not off-track exactly; they just don’t know there is a track to be on. It’s hard to know where to even start with such essays. And they’re waiting in those piles to torment me with their insipidity.

Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that most essay grading involves a fictional bargain between student and professor. In theory, the student has worked hard on the paper: she’s thought through the topic, done relevant research, made notes and outlines, completed several drafts, and finally, at long last, handed it in. The professor evaluates the work, notes its strengths and weakness, and provides thoughtful advice for how to do even better next time. The student takes that advice gratefully and can’t wait ’til the next paper comes due to show off what she’s learned.

In reality, though, most students do only about as much as they think they need to pass the course, or stay in their program, or get into their next program. Similarly, professors know that their comments will go largely or entirely unread, and those that are read will not likely be taken to heart. They pretend to work hard; we pretend they want to get better.

This enduring game of academic make-believe was brought into focus for me the other day when I overheard a student amusedly complaining to her friend that her professor was suggesting ways to improve a paper that had already received a good grade. “I’m fine with an 80!” she laughed. Of course. Why settle for better when you can do good?

Every once in a while, there is a genuinely good paper to help break the monotony. I once had an excellent student whose name put her papers at the top of the pile (I grade in alphabetical order), but I always used to move her essay to the middle because I knew by then I would need an excellent paper to help keep me going. Maybe such a student is waiting patiently in one of those piles right now.

I guess it’s time to find out…

Prof says he used peer-to-peer marking software for three years with no complaints

According to The National Post, a University of Toronto professor who started a peer-to-peer grading system in his psychology class three years ago has been ordered to cease and desist by Ontario’s highest court.

Steve Joordens, who placed in the top 20 of TVO’s best lecturer contest last year, says he wanted his large 1,500-student first-year psychology class to write and think critically. But the course only had the budget for multiple-choice assignments that were marked by a machine.

That is, until one of his students designed software that allowed five students to mark a peer’s work then calculated an average grade. These peer-marked assignments made up 10 per cent of students’ final marks for three years, during which Joordens says he didn’t get a single complaint.

But, when it discovered the marking system, the union representing U of T’s teaching assistants and sessionals filed a grievance against the school. In January, an independent arbitrator found that the union’s collective agreement does not allow students or teaching assistants at the university to mark for professors without getting paid.

Joordens appealed that decision to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which upheld the original decision June 8.

For his part, the professor says he hopes he can find a way to continue using the software that would be acceptable under the union’s collective agreement.

“It just seems kind of silly,” says Joordens. “It’s just like we stepped on their little piece of ground and even if we were trying to do good for everyone, they won’t have it.”