Eliminate Grading, Yes!

by Cliopatria

I have 22 papers to grade. I am not entirely ecstatic about the task - but I am looking forward to reading them because they will tell me if I utterly wasted the last 14 weeks of my life. Somewhere in those 260+ pages will be a sentence or two that will make it all worth it. Or not.

Ailee Slater, at the University of Oregon, brings the logic of a capitalist enterprise to the lyceé:

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we're learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn't happy with the cleaning job. If I'm paying someone to do my housekeeping, I'll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn't it be the same with education?
[...]
Their newfound education is not recognized, and they have, in essence, paid money to be told that they are idiots. If I want to be told that I'm an idiot, I could just get drunk and leave embarrassing messages on the phone machines of attractive men -- for free.
[...]
Then there is the constant fountain of stress, emerging from that oh-so-reviled spigot of essays, quizzes and final projects.

You Betcha! If I didn't have to give essay assignments, quizzes, and final projects, I would greatly reduce my stress of teaching and I can go back to leaving embarrassing messages on the phone machines of attractive men.

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More Comments:

Ed Schmitt - 12/10/2004

Dr. Dresner - I read your posts with interest as you often have some great insights, and I've seen you earlier make a similar statement about the fact we're paid to grade. I think I get the gist of what you mean by this, but I'd like to probe it just a bit further. Do you mean that we're paid for that because it's the hardest and most tedious thing we do, or because it's of greatest value to our students, or because it's of the greatest value to our schools? Or to society generally by providing the distinctions between students that allow them to find their most appropriate vocations? I realize these may not be mutually exclusive categories, but I'm just curious as to your thinking. I personally would agree with the first emphasis far more than any of the others. And I wish I only had 22 papers to grade in the next two weeks! :) (Not to belittle your workload, Prof. Ahmed. I enjoyed your post.)

Jonathan Dresner - 12/9/2004

As I said, more or less, over at Little Professor, the conflation of education with housecleaning is deeply troubling. It's really much more like babysitting....

Seriously, though, either UO doesn't have course evaluation forms (in which she could indeed tell the instructor how their tidying up ranks) or she doesn't think they actually equalize the relationship as much as grades.

But grading is what we're paid to do. Teaching we'd do for a lot less; research most of us would do for free, anyway. But they don't pay us anywhere near enough for the evaluation and feedback work we do.

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/9/2004

There are moments that relieve the tedium.

This one happily is not a student blooper. It's a quote from a 1946 Wisconsin school superintendent in a pretty good paper on sex education.

"The girls in our school are in dire need of some hygiene and sex education."