Grading

Grading

I agree with Lang when he says that grading can be the least appealing aspect of teaching.  I too wish that I could teach without grades.  I often times have students who are too focused on their grade and not focused enough on the material.  These students are not always the over-achievers either.   They are the students who receive a C in my class who would normally get an A or a B in another course.  They want to raise their grade but do not realize that the grade is actually a reflection of their understanding of the material.  They may have a tough time with second language acquisition and thus would benefit from more one on one instruction.  But the student never asks how he/she could better understand the material.  They never ask for study tips or tricks for learning a second language.  And there I sit in my office hours eager to help but no one ever comes to visit.  Instead, the students ask how they can raise their grade without thinking what the grade represents.  The student thinks less of him/herself because they are not receiving the grade they feel they deserve.  What the student does not see is how much they have improved from the first day of class.  Their test scores went from 70 to 77 percent and they certainly know a lot more now than when they started the class.  So, when a student comes to me about their grade, I always try to make them see what it truly means.

                This is why I have, in the past, accepted late work.  I want my students to see that there is value in doing the homework because it gives them a chance to practice the language on their own.  If I did not accept late work, then the student would not do the assignment at all, they would fail the class, and they would not have learned the subject matter. Ultimately, I am there to teach them German, not life lessons.  So, I have accepted their late work.  However, just as Lang points out, this has caused me a bit of a headache.  Grading goes much faster when you sit down and run through a stack of the same assignment all at once.  Students turning assignments in late or making up tests causes a lot of confusion and it ends up taking up much more of my own time.  This is why I am deciding to tighten the reigns.  A former professor once said to me that he expects a lot, but he also gets a lot in return.  If I do not expect much from my students, then I cannot complain when they do not turn in assignments on time.  It makes more sense to me now that doing the assignment later does not give them extra practice, it simply distracts from the new material, thus causing the student to fall further behind in their work.  We will see how my new approach works this coming semester. 

Cheaters

I remember the first time I caught a student cheating.  I was 17 and living in Germany at the time. My host-mother was grading papers and she kept going over one paper in particular.  She knew her students and this one student, she said, would never have produced this paper on his own, but she had no way of proving it and did not want to accuse him based on a hunch.  I was on the internet at the time so I asked to see the paper.  I typed the first sentence into the Google search bar and the first result was for an online service which sold term papers.  Obviously the paper was plagiarized and now she had the proof to confront the student.  I remember almost laughing about how silly it was to cheat when it was so easy to detect it.

In my classroom I have also come across some very blatantly plagiarized essays.  The students will use google translate to produce sentence structures and use grammar we have not covered and will not cover until the next semester.  I tell my students how easy it is to spot these plagiarized essays and still I will find them on essays from even my brighter students.  The internet of course has made it easier for the students to cheat, but it also makes it easier for us to spot cheating, so it seems very silly for the students to try and cheat.  

If I suspect someone has cheated, I always like to back up my claim with evidence.  I will pull up the sentence in Google Translate and show the student that Google does not aways work and that it gets things wrong more often than not.  I also like to explain to the students that they are only hurting themselves.  I remind them that they will not have a dictionary when they have to write an essay on an exam or quiz.  They will often come back with an argument saying that they did not know how to say something and only looked up that one sentence.  I would reply to that student saying that they are better off practicing the sentence structures and vocabulary from the current chapter, since that is what the test will cover.  The more they practice the material from the current chapter, then they can expect a better grade when tested on that material.  This is ultimately the point of the assignment, but many students fail to see that. 

This is again where transparency in the classroom becomes crucial.  When students know you as an instructor and they know why you assign certain activities, then the activity is worth more to the student because they see the purpose.  After explaining the purpose to the student who has cheated, they seem genuinely shocked that there was indeed a reason to complete the assignment on their own.  I feel that many students who plagiarize do not see the purpose in many assignments.  Perhaps I am a little too forgiving, but instead of giving a zero I let the student re-do the assignment for a partial grade.  My thinking is that by having the student re-do the assignment, I am reiterating that there is a purpose to completing each assignment.  I feel this will then deter further plagiarism because I will have built a stronger relationship with the student and ideally shown him/her the value in completing ones own work.  Furthermore, it teaches the student that plagiarism is not less work, but more because the student now needs to complete the assignment in addition to keeping up with the material.