Grading across a Career
Donald Walhout
Aug 1, 1997
Citations
6
Citations
Journal
College Teaching
Full text
Semantic Scholar
Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: Grading across a career can reveal principles and make recommendations about grade averages, which should be based on the experience of a long career.
Abstract
Like most experienced professors, I can look back on a grading career. Now that it is over, I would like to reflect on it a few moments before it de scends to the region of sunken ships? perhaps with buried treasure. Of personal interest is the question of whether my grading habits were justified. But since this question would be of no general interest, I wish, more globally, to extract some principles and to make a recom mendation about grade averages. To let the secret out immediately, I may say that I ended up with giving a C+ aver age over forty years. This would be too low, too harsh, by today's practices, which favor averages in the Btrail, if not in the B hive itself. Yet my average does correspond to a traditional opinion that if a college stipulates C as the average for its students, then, since many below-aver age students will drop out in the first two years, the remaining above-average jun iors and seniors should raise the stipulat ed average to an actual average of about C+. But before we focus on this reason