An Ethical Grading Dilemma--Or Not

Sigh. I have a struggle. It's grading time again. (JP, Batmite!, quit your snickering.) I'm nearly done with grades. Everything has been tabulated, I just need to write out the response sheets, do all the copying for the administrati and log grades into the system. That's what I'm doing tomorrow. But I have one folder left sitting on my desk.

Normally, grades are pretty clear cut. If you've been working consistently over the semester, it's almost impossible for you not to do well, unless you screw up and shred half of your portfolio. If you've been dicking around all semester, well, you're probably going to get the dicking you deserve when grades come out, unless you've worked your hind spot off at revision. Some really crappy writers have passed this class when I thought they just didn't really have the mental capacity to go on simply because they checked all the boxes they needed to check in order to pass the class. It's not very good. But it followed the instructions. You can't fail for grammar here (and I don't think that's fair anyway), and you can't fail a person based on being a really boring writer. Nor can you fail them because they sit there and stare at you blankly with an open mouth, no matter how much you want to; because in the end, they did turn in the required number of papers with their own opinions on them/required number of research citations/the minimum number of points on the grading rubric passed to go on. Even if reading their work is like watching paint dry, that's not considered relevant. And then, some really bad writers have surprised me with the amount of work they put into their final product, and they improved their grade accordingly.

Shifty Sherry is none of the above. She is a special case unto herself.

She disappeared about halfway through the semester and would pop back in sporadically. Never heard a peep about missing work, she never asked how she could catch herself up, and she never offered any reasons as to why she was missing, either through email or by coming to my office or staying after class. When our final project came up, which is a group project, she had missed so much class that we had forgotten she was in class. So when she came back (once), I put her in with a group that was good enough to "adopt" her. She promptly missed the rest of the sessions and went incommunicado on emails, causing her partners much stress. The class when the project was due, she stayed afterward and told me she "had" to pass this class, how worried she was, blah blah blah; she actually tried to blame her partners, who'd put the project together with limited help from her, for her poor grades. Then she told me she'd missed my class (both of of the classes I teach) because she was basically having weird woman troubles. It probably didn't help her that I was having my own woman troubles that day. I know people who have severe period problems--those people go to the doctor and get excuses. She said she had no doctor's excuses for the time she'd missed in class. A few days later, she basically admitted she just didn't feel like coming to class some days, so our massive bleeding emergency got downgraded to the blahs. I have the blahs all the time and I still end up coming to class.

So, this drags on for the next few classes (we didn't have many left anyway). She managed to squeak by in U101 (although I still have to go back and make sure that's the case), and she gave me a major headache about how many absences she has. She wanted me to basically drop everything I was doing and calculate her absences posthaste to see if it would make a difference in her grade, because she "just couldn't fail." Here's the problem. I'm pretty sure that for the days she was absent, I didn't send around an attendance sheet. I know I could fail her on absences, but I have to provide documentation for it, because I know she'll challenge it. I can feel it in my skinny little bones. Her portfolio had absolutely no revision to it. I gave her an F for participation (because you have to be there to participate, and she slept through one class) and that includes the partner project which she went AWOL on. I ran the rest of the grades she had coming.

She's on the cusp of failing.

I could basically massage the grades a teensy tad and she'd fail. Or, I could leave them as they stand and pass her by the skin of the skin of her teeth.

I think I'm failing her.

A part of me feels a little guilty about that, I guess because I know I'm going back and looking at the numbers again, partly because there is an element of subjectivity to grading but partly because I'm justifying failing her, when most times it's so obvious whether a person has or hasn't. But mostly I just can't find it in me to pass her. I'm still kicking myself for forgetting those attendance sheets (or losing them), because that would make this so much simpler. And there is also the irritation factor--if you really cared about your grade, you'd have contacted me any of the other gabillion times you missed class to give me a heads up. When I gave her an email asking her to get her butt in gear and contact her partners, she didn't even bother to contact me, and she certainly didn't go on to contact them. She blew off her midsemester conference with me where we were supposed to talk about why she was failing other classes besides mine. She even rescheduled with me twice and didn't come to any of the appointments and gave no explanation. So, getting all teary-eyed now just means she's just realized the royally screwed position she put herself in. And that she thinks she can manage to pass this class because she's reasonably certain she's failing her other classes, and she "needs" this one to salvage her GPA/not go on academic probation. I've been around long enough to know how that game is played.

So, I think I'm failing her. But I'm going to have to write a good defense, because she'll definitely try to challenge it. And so I feel less like I'm doing something arbitrary. I'm not. It just feels that way because I have a personal feeling about the grading. Most of the time I have no feelings whatsoever about grading--grades are grades, and you get what you get. That's why I use rubrics so I can check boxes yes or no instead of using the "shrug and slap a B" on it method, or whatever. But yes, I have a "feeling" about this grade, and so my action needs defending.

Speaking of which, funny thing: she wants to be a lawyer.

-- DV