Grades an easy mark for second-guessers

Grading was the toughest part of college teaching for me, especially when it came to students who worked hard but didn’t do well and students who hardly worked but did fine.

It’s clearly an issue for other teachers as well. A state report released two weeks ago documents significant gaps between the scores that high school students earned on the standardized End of Course Tests and the grades they received from their teachers. In some districts, large numbers of students received A’s in the courses despite failing the End of Course Test.

Some educators insist that class grades are the more comprehensive and more accurate measure of performance. And as one teacher asked me, “Shouldn’t effort count for something?”

We all know students who attend every class and turn in every assignment yet still do poorly, sometimes because they don’t test well or because they didn’t have the prerequisites to succeed in the course. Such students may not deserve to fail, but should they earn an A for their effort?

And what about the students who are so far ahead of their peers that they can goof off in class, blow off homework and yet ace the midterm and final. Do they merit an A?

If grades represent a cut-and-dried account of how much a student knows at the end of a course, tests may be the fairest assessment. In fact, it would make sense to permit students to skip the classes altogether if a pre-test demonstrated that they already grasped the material.

But does that approach ignore other relevant and important measures? Shouldn’t a student earn credit for showing up on time, for being respectful of the teacher and peers and for trying, even when the results fall short?

I once taught a cocky 20-year-old who’d been suspended from his prestigious university and ended up in my evening class at a community college in Florida, where the average student was about 60. The young man had already taken a similar course at his former school, so he was disgruntled to be repeating the same material and sitting next to classmates wearing orthotics. His displeasure showed. I gave him the A, but it hurt.

But in the workplace, many of us deal with competent co-workers who are quite unpleasant. Are their evaluations or salaries downgraded because they let their cellphones ring incessantly, never wash out a cup or pilfer someone else’s yogurt from the fridge? Not in my experience.

On the other side of the grading equation, I’ve taught diligent students who respected their classmates, arrived early, stayed late, but flubbed the tests, usually because they entered college without the necessary fundamentals. In a painful conversation, a young woman told me that my D would cost her a summer internship. I explained that I couldn’t send her onto more advanced classes when she hadn’t yet mastered the basics.

It would be heartwarming to report that when I ran into her years later on the street, she greeted me warmly and thanked me for forcing her to take a remedial class. But it wasn’t quite like that. She shunned me, which is another reason why teaching ranks as the hardest job I ever had.

mdowney@ajc.com