Having graded around 65 essay questions in the past three days, I’m ready to dip my feet back into the blogging pool, as I draw near my extended guest stint. I find myself not at all relieved to be done with this pile, because I have another pile of 75 con law exams waiting for me, and these are a good deal longer. Happily, the con law exam was a somewhat better-designed exam, so at least it should go fairly smoothly. While getting through the exam pile is most of the battle, moreover, it is not the whole battle. There is the nagging insecurity and delicacy involved in attempting to grade with consistency — especially where, as in this case, my legal ethics essay question was too much of a race-horse, such that I can’t simply count up the issues covered by each student and how well they were covered, but must allow for different scope of coverage by each student. There is the difficulty (not impossibility, I stress — just difficulty) of figuring out why one exam gets 14 points and another gets 15. And there is the difficulty of turning all these raw scores into a final score, graded on a curve. I think I feel the same way about grading that I do about winter in Toronto: you always forget what it’s like, and it’s always worse than you remembered. I understandably expect zero sympathy from my students.
Let me get my feet wet on other topics before revisiting the filibuster question, although I greatly appreciate the patience of my questioner.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on May 19, 2005 at 04:54 PM