Just Your Opinion

Students sometimes complain that because paper grades are “Just your opinion,” they shouldn’t count. All opinions are equal, right?

• My doctor has taken several blood tests and a biopsy, and his opinion is that I don’t have cancer. But that’s just his opinion, so why should I listen to him?
• My stock broker, with an advanced business degree and years of experience, tells me that I should sell a particular stock. But that’s just her opinion. Why should I listen to her?
• My mechanic measures the tread depth on my tires and compares it with industry standard charts. His opinion is that my tires are unsafe and I should buy new ones. But that’s just his opinion. Why should I listen to him?

If you find yourself reading these and saying, “Duh! These people know what they are talking about! Of course you should listen to them!” then you are getting my point. My doctor knows what cancer symptoms are like. He’s studied. My stockbroker has studied the markets and has a good feeling for what makes money. My mechanic is a specialist too; he’s trained and sees dozens of cars a month. His opinion counts.

Just your opinion

In common talk, “just your opinion” means “you are talking about your feelings, and all feelings are equal, so I’ll let you say your thing, then ignore you.” Many high school kids (and many adults, too) believe that there are no real facts and that experts should all be ignored. They are just talking about their feelings. If your opinion is that the sun is a tiny thing that goes around the earth, and I believe that the sun is a Greek god who rides a golden chariot, and those stuffy astronomers (who have never actually landed on the sun) believe that the sun is a huge ball of fire that we orbit around—the high school kid approach says that those are just opinions and nobody is right or wrong. There really are no facts.

That works at the lunch table, where everyone is equally ignorant. It works at the family barbecue where Uncle Herbert has had too much beer and you don’t want to get him started. It doesn’t work in situations where a genuine expert actually knows what they are talking about. Cancer. Investments. Tires. English papers.

Counting commas

I used to teach at a community college where we graded English papers by counting errors. There were 38 things we looked at for each paper, and it was possible to fail English 101 by a single comma. The pass rate wasn’t too high (One student took the course 10 times before landing in my first class there.) and the writing wasn’t too good—everyone focused on hitting those marks, not on content or style. Students would stop me in the hall and ask, “I put in that comma you marked wrong. Can I have one more point?”

I guess one advantage of the error-counting approach is that it’s bomb-proof. I can tell you exactly why your paper got a 76 and your neighbor got a 77. Some students really like that, but it’s not writing.

So how do I grade a 100 paper?

In the English Department, we use rubrics (a fancy word for “grade sheets”) to guide our grading. The one we’re using for 100 divides the grade into five areas:

• Focus
• Content/Development
• Organization
• Style/Audience
• Conventions

After reading and marking the student’s paper, I write a short overall comment about what I am seeing (both the good and the not-so-good). Then I move to the rubric try to find comments which describe the paper I have just read, and I circle the comment. After this, it’s just a matter of arithmetic: There are five horizontal groups which correspond to the five possible grades (A, B, C, D, F), and a bit of work with a calculator gives me a grade for the paper.

In general, this rubric works well: A student who has good things to say but struggles with awkward sentences won’t fail the paper and gets guidance about where to improve. Sometimes, however, a paper comes through which doesn’t fit the rubric: well-written but totally off the assignment or so full of grammar and spelling errors that it cannot be called a college-level paper. In those rare instances, I’ll ignore the rubric and do a holistic grade, with an explanation to attempt to describe the reason for the grade.

Conclusion of this long discussion

In the real world, very few outcomes are hard-edged and absolute. (If you don’t get the exact numbers on your ticket, you don’t win the lottery.) Most of us, most of the time, deal in probabilities. (If you invest in this stock, you will probably make some money.) Most experts understand this. Your car mechanic tells you that if you don’t put gas in your tank, your car will absolutely quit running. She also says that in her opinion, the condition of your tires and brakes is good enough for that long trip next week. She cannot guarantee that you won’t have a blowout; she just knows what years of looking at tires has taught her.

That’s how college grades work too. Some grades are absolute. (Name the bones in this diagram of the human hand.) Some, probably the more important, are based on a teacher’s estimate (opinion) of your level of understanding. (How does Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development affect your understanding of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed?)