Justice is Blind -- and Right the First Time

I was asked recently to look over a few grade reviews. Overall, I'm impressed both at the care taken with the process and with the gall some students seem to have.

After I agreed to be a blind reviewer, I got the packets in my office box. I get the entire portfolio, and one of the office secretaries has whited out most all instructor's comments and grades. I'm literally getting it like it's just submitted. Sometimes I get information like what the instructor gave for class participation grades -- that's not something I could know by looking at a portfolio. But if I wanted to know what the first teacher had given it, I'd have to guess. There is no way of telling. In the cases I looked at, I was also the second blind reviewer. I got no notes on what the first reviewer thought. The dude in charge basically averages our scores together to see if that average differs significantly from the instructor who gave the original grade. The process is very solid, at least based on my experiences with it. If only 3% of appeals are approved, we must be pretty in sync grading-wise.

Or it could be because people who submit grade appeals are largely stupid.

Of the three reviews I did today, two of them were abysmal attempts at writing and the third was a pretentious attempt to get an A when the student was lucky to get that B. One student was simply ... incoherent. There really isn't another way to explain it. He wrote about Cartman and South Park as being the formative experience in his life. At least I think it was. It was hard to figure out what he was saying. His final project was a bunch of movie reviews. Our final project for that class involves creating multiple genres based on research. He wrote a bunch of very simplistic and poorly spelled movie reviews. I found myself wanting to write WTF in the margins quite often. Which I probably could've done, it's a blind review. Another student went off on a tear about Bush, and it wasn't even a particularly factual tear. S/he wrote an entire paper about the wrong interpretation of a cartoon. The final argument paper was about why we should lower the drinking age to 16 years old because it's hard for bartenders to make more than $120 a week. If that wasn't his or her intention, that was certainly the point I got out of it.

Good lord. As I said in a previous post, there were more grade appeals than normal this semester, probably because of the recession. There will probably be more in the next few weeks. But those three certainly will NOT be part of the 3% triumphing over the system.

-- Dante's Virgil