Red marks in the margins: a professor's take on the evolutionary art of grading

I DON'T MIND RESPONDING to the English papers my community college students turn in, but I resent having to grade them.

Grades always seem like someone else's imprecise idea or crazy yardstick, not mine. My commenting on a paper, on the other hand, is personal, part of my relationship with my students. I mean it to be conversational, and sometimes my students take it that way, and then it's like passing notes in the back row.

I confess that I don't remember what any elementary, junior high, or high school teacher ever wrote on my papers. What my college teachers wrote on my papers, however, did matter to me, maybe because I had less regular contact with them, maybe because I was scarcely conscious before I was 17, but most probably because by the end of my freshman year I had transferred within the University of California, Santa Barbara, to a program - the College of Creative Studies - that did not give grades.

The only requirement for admission to the literature major, as the provost (and great critic) Marvin Mudrick liked to say, was that we be bookworms. Over the next three years I occasionally took classes in other programs at the university, but I got over caring about grades. I only cared about the comments my teachers made.

Professor Mudrick often wrote only one or two words at the end of the paper: evaluative judgments. My classmates and I didn't complain. That was enough for us. (I should add that many of his evaluations came in the classroom, when he would read aloud the essay or story and talk about it. We therefore had less need for marks on the paper.) I had thus a few blissful years with teachers who treated my writing as if I was or could be a grown-up, and who took me seriously enough to take my writing seriously. They liked or disliked my papers, and they were to the point in saying so and why. Grades - who needed them?

I did, because soon after, as a graduate student, I began teaching the freshman English course. I discovered that the hardest part of marking papers was not that instantaneous realization of the grade: A! B-! C+! It was trying to justify it. My comments kept getting longer, but not better. I would write and write, explaining to my student or, worse, arguing with myself, about why, for example, it was a B and not a B+.

Everybody was confused about why I hadn't criticized a previous essay as much as this one, and why that one had got a B, and this one, to which I'd responded with impatient, demanding questions, had received an A.

I escaped this quagmire only after one of my sensible friends asked why I even bothered justifying the grade.

I didn't care about grades, but if a student didn't like what I had come up with, she could come talk it over with me. I focused the comment on my response to the paper - that was all - and I felt better about and more sure of myself.

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