Re: grades

Jim Kalmbach (kalmbach@RS6000.CMP.ILSTU.EDU)
Fri, 23 Aug 1996 08:45:31 -0600

>Although grades may be odious to some of us, students rely on them to
>decide whether to drop courses and at our university a professor who does
>not give students reasonable feedback about how they are doing in the
>course before the drop deadline is considered to be negligent.

I didn't think I would get involved in this thread, but here I go.
Reasonable feedback seems like a real reasonable criteria for any teacher
to meet. Because I have not graded papers for the twenty years I have been
teaching, I have evolved two dense pages of grading criteria that I include
in my syllabus (what consists an A in the class, what consistutes a B etc).
The result is that students may not have a grade but they have a detailed
sense of what is expected of them. I tell my students far more about what
is expected of them than most teachers who let the grade do that work for
them.

Jim

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Jim Kalmbach
(309) 438-7840 kalmbach@ilstu.edu
Department of English--Campus box 4240
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4240
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