I'm a Grade Inflator

Looking over my students' final grades, I see clearly that they're inflated. Most students are a full letter grade higher than what I feel they should be. I gave them too high of grades on their papers, and now they have too high of grades for the class.

I know I set the bar lower this semester than last semester, because I just wasn't getting the quality I hoped for. There were a few excellent papers, but a lot of C and D quality work that I gave B's and C's instead. I wanted to encourage them. I hate giving a D to a paper that looks like someone worked hard on. I hate giving a C when the paper has no obvious defects other than being really boring. And I hate not having a single paper in the stack which clearly deserves an A.

I try to be positive when I grade. I try not to concentrate on little things like punctuation or awkward wording. I look for that excellent paper that I can honestly enjoy reading. And I don't always find it.

I guess, in the end, the important question is How does grade inflation affect my students? Does getting an A or B in my class make them think they don't need to keep working on their writing? I don't think so, because many of my students' reflective essays commented on how this class made them realize they weren't quite as good as they thought they were. Hopefully the comments and conferences made as much impact as the actual grades, so that even if they think they're pretty good writers already, they have some idea of their strengths and weaknesses in the future. If they continue taking courses which force them to write, hopefully the practice will help them improve. Hopefully even if they didn't master all the skills from my course that I'd hoped they would, when a professor writes "choppy" on a paper in their future, they might vaguely remember that that one teacher said "choppy" means to connect your sentences with words like "although," "because," and "for example." And so writing will at least be conquerable if not conquered.