Grading

I love teaching. To me, the whole profession is incredibly rewarding even with the long hours of planning and correcting. When I'm not doing that, I'm in front of my students being the odd combination of teacher, talk show host and comedian. (Okay, I can only be a comedian on my really good days.)

The only thing I don't really like about teaching is grading. I should clarify. Correcting copies is fine. Sure it can be tedious, but it lets me know what my students still don't understand. It's the actual assigning of a grade that I really don't like. Ugh. Maybe I just don't like to give my students bad grades even when I know that those are the grades they earned.

In France, marking is particularly hard simply because the point of it all seems to be to let the students know that they don't know anything. Their marks just seem to scream at them, "You're so incredibly stupid !!" For one thing, the grading system is not out of 100 points but out of 20. Yes, twenty. It doesn't leave much room for variation, and you certainly can't lose very many points without failing.

To make things even worse, you can't simply adjust the grading system to the American version. That would be too easy. Nobody ever gets 18/20 or higher unless they've completed the assignment as well as a professor. A perfect score or even nineteen out of twenty is the stuff of legends. Give the students a grade like that and they'll think it's a mistake. The best score most students can hope for is a sixteen--an 80%. A low B by US standards. So why don't they grade out of sixteen points instead of out of twenty? I have no idea. All I know is that 16 is very good, anything below ten is failing and anything in between 10 and 16 is considered good or average.

So here I am going through my poor students' copies, correcting their little English mistakes, suggesting better ways for them to organize their essays and then trying to assign them a French grade even though I have the "feel-good" American system stuck in my head. I know that they will be surprised when they get their exams back. I can already hear the comments: "Mais, c'est très gentil Madame." This is really nice, Ma'am. Meaning "too nice." Whereas most French teachers would fail around three quarters of their students, I just cannot do it. Sure the students' work isn't perfect, but in most cases, I wouldn't say it was at the level of failing. So why fail them?

And so it is with this sense of fairness (or pity?) that I assign my students their "too nice" grades. And most of them will not only pass my class, but will probably pass it with a "good grade." That's okay with me. I tell myself that my high marks will tip the scales just a tiny bit in the direction of encouragement and maybe, just maybe, allow my students to continue their studies at the university. But in reality, it's more likely that such marks will only give me the reputation of being the silly, easy-grading American teacher. Ugh.