Grading - art or science?

Ugh... grading.

You would make me try to write down what I do, wouldn't you?

Anyway, the analogy I begin with is that of the varsity football team. If a kid sticks with the team all year and is a senior, but hardly ever gets in the game, he still gets a varsity letter -- the same varsity letter that the star running back gets.

What the star running back gets beyond the letter is adulation, possible scholarships, etc.

What the not-so-talented or hard working kid gets is the chance to play on the Kickoff Return team (which is where I used to stick kids where they would do the least damage when I coached). But that kid was needed in practice, because we needed people to practice against. And perhaps he provided some comic relief. And perhaps it was enough for that kid just to be part of the team. Who knows?

Some football players are lazy and break training rules, yet still start and still are stars. Some football players work hard all the time, but just aren't very big, or very talented. Same with journalists.

But they all deserve a letter. It's a team, after all, and one of the chapters in my favorite leadership book "Management of the Absurd," is "People we think need changing turn out to be pretty good after all." In other words, looking back at groups we are part of, we find that it took all types to make up the whole, and it would have been a different group, a "lesser group, if we had changed them all into clones of ourselves.

So... pretty much everybody gets an A from me on newspaper or yearbook (sort of like a varsity letter). If they screw up, I occasionally drop them to a B or even lower. Oh my!

Grades are like praise for me: they don't really motivate people (as "Management of the Absurd" reminds us). They simply demonstrate my power. So I begin the semester saying, "Everybody gets an A, unless you mess up the rest of the staff so badly we can't fix it. Now let's talk about being a great newspaper/yearbook."

That is it.

Do I still get ticked at kids who screw around? Miss deadlines? Forget to run spell check? Interview only friends? Of course. But what makes me happy is a great team, and teams never work well when some team members get all the attention and acclaim from the coach.

Others give my "stars" their acclaim, in the form of individual and group awards from Quill and Scroll, or the Colorado High School Press Association, or any number of other organizations.

From me, they get constructive criticism, and an "A" if they even come close to doing what they are supposed to.

When an editor complains to me that some staffer is getting the same grade as she is, even though he is not doing quality work, I say, "Does that diminish your grade? If not, are you looking for justice? You may have to search a long time to find justice in this world. And don't you get to cover the plum assignments? Don't you get to control much of what goes into the paper? Don't others acknowledge your talent? What more do you want? Do you want me to beat the crap out of the lower performing people?"

Then we laugh.

To finish with my football analogy, I much prefer the pass-fail approach to grading (or A-F). If you skip enough practices and mess around enough, you get dismissed from the football team. Same with the newspaper or yearbook staff.

Screw up enough and you don't come back next term.

That's my grading philosophy, and I'm sticking with it.