What's in a grade?

On Wednesday afternoon, I was walking across the bridge that connects the two halves of my campus, through a flurry of snowflakes, on my way to an interminable but important meeting. I'd been grading papers all morning, and I was thinking about how someone who was an administrator instead of an instructor would hear that phrase "grading papers." It sounds simple, but what does it really entail?

For me, grading requires a lot: First I have to read the students' essays/documents. This means decifering (especially if they've handwritten their work), decoding (especially if they've used language and syntax in a way they think is sophisticated), understanding what they were saying AND what they were trying to say, diagnosing the issues behind that gap. So these are all the actions just for reading the students' work.

Next comes assessing, figuring out how this particular document compares with the criteria we're using to analyze writing, criteria that I've handed out to them, of course. "Is the lack of development in this essay a 10 out of 20 points or 12 out of 20 points?" This assessment is linked to the diagnosis above because the assessment is a way to help the students see what they've got to work on this semester.

Then comes composing the comment that I write to accompany the essay scores. This comment has to be sufficiently encouraging and yet critically accurate - no small feat. And I write knowing that many, many students don't even look at what I've written - they've been conditioned to react to a score or grade because that's what gets measured.

[Aside: I read a quote from Einstein: "Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted, counts." Yep.]

And finally, I must hand the documents back to the students, who're nervous, as am I sometimes, because they feel judged - their writing is *them* - and I completely understand this feeling. I can say over and over, "The score is for this artifact, not for you. The comments are to help you figure out how to improve your score if you choose to do so." But the whole institution of education conditions them to ignore these kinds of comments.

So that's what I've been doing when I've been "grading papers."