This is a guest post by the resident pain-in-the-ass-partner, D.
As a teacher, one of the most dreaded and gut-wrenchingly difficult tasks you face is assigning overall course grades at the end of a term. You see, it's not as easy as the "good students get As," the "above average students gets Bs," etc. Usually, you have numerous battles [sometimes with your own conscience, sometimes with
colleagues, etc.] over just *how* to do it – i.e., what system will be fair, ethical, and appropriate to both individual students and the class as a whole?
At the school where RB and I teach, we don't get to (or have to) make ANY of these difficult decisions. These decisions are made for us. RB and I, not so affectionately, have dubbed the process "MAGIC GRADES."
This is how MAGIC GRADES work. Start with the number of students enrolled in your class and then multiple that number by two different percentages: 20% and 75%. This represents the percentage of A grades and the percentage of A and B grades combined that one is strongly suggested to give. On paper, the official guidelines allow for some flexibility; however, I was told ". . . do this if you want to avoid trouble."
For example, I have 77 students in one of my classes. So, I need to give 15 students a grade of "A" (i.e., 77 * 0.20 = 15); and I also need to give a total of 58 students a grade of either "A" or "B" (i.e., 77 * 0.75 = 58). Note, this grade assignment must occur irrespective of the actual score they earned in the class (e.g., a student who earned only 50% of the total class points will magically receive a 'B' rather than an 'F' simply because we need more Bs in this particular class).
And now you know the "rest of the story!"
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2 comments:
Oooo...the "magical realism" of grading! No doubt there's an opportunity here for analysis of the ideologies of grading yadda yadda yadda.
Instead, I thank you for the Paul Harvey allusion. For readers not in the know, they should put a big pause between "know" and "the," and then emphasize the "rest." Just to get the full Harvey effect.
I've heard some classes here (in Statistics, for instance) take the same approach. Fortunately, I don't have to do this for my classes. Maybe because first-year English isn't considered as important as their major classes?
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