Grading Papers

Over the last three weeks, I've been a TA in a college course designed for high schoolers. We had pretty much all seniors except for a couple sophomores. The students take a 100-level college course (for credit) over an intensive month. It's a lot. I didn't do any teaching of the content of the course, a kind of historical and politically scientific focus on "democracy," but I did teach and work with the students on writing an argumentative essay.

This teaching on argumentative essays was what I did at the university I worked out, so I converted what I did over nine months into three weeks. Not easy! Additionally, these are high school students, no college students, so there's an extra obstacle there. Anyway, I don't want to focus on the pedagogical differences in secondary and post-secondary education; suffice it to say that the high schoolers were unsurprisingly not up to par.

Deciding on the grading was difficult. For me, while I neither like nor particularly agree with the 4.0 grading scale, I can at least think with it; so a C is for average work. However, the professor had stipulated that a B would be average work. Overall, most students produced average work that I would expect from a high schooler and very few produced anything above average. Some did produce work below average. I think those grades are good, though. The assignment would have been difficult for college freshmen or sophomores, so even the attempt from high schoolers is notable.

Reading all those papers was hard, though! The above average papers were really nice to read, I was quite proud of those students. And all but maybe two showed real effort, so, even though I couldn't give them superlative grades, I was happy to give them feedback.