Things Composition Instructors Do That Annoy Students: Shadow Grades

In teaching composition, certainly where I was trained in and first did the job, it was common procedure to employ "shadow grades" on certain writing assignments. In this case what this meant was that students would write papers, the instructors would evaluate them, and provide their feedback, with the "shadow grade" consisting of the grade they had earned--with the understanding that revision was assigned, and the grade improvable. That is to say that here was their grade; and in the written notes, here was what they had to do to turn whatever they got into the grade they actually want.

All of this seems reasonable enough, easy enough to understand, and even comfortable for the student, who is given a chance to fix what may have needed fixing. But it did not always seem that way to the student.

To be quite honest, some did not seem to fully grasp the system. But even where they did what was real to them was the grade they had now, not the hypothetical better grade that was by no means guaranteed--the more in as many found, or said they found, anything but an "A" a rude shock. ("Every English teacher I've ever had has always given me an 'A!'" I heard many a time--while I can say that I did see weeping right there in class, and even tantrums, over Cs, in at least one case on the part of a student who was clearly way, way, way past eighteen and any claim to forgiveness for callowness on the score of age.) And of course, if the gap between the grade they hoped for and the grade they got was wide, and they had enough experience to know just how grinding revision can be, they may have felt despair--as indeed, I found that students commonly decline to do anything more than make simple corrections to grammar and spelling. (For instance, if the instructor tells the student that what they have is not a unified essay, but a collection of disconnected paragraphs, and that they will have to establish a clear thesis and either connect or discard the material that does not fit in with it, they are unlikely to go about that to any great degree.)

Do I pretend to have a tidy fix for the problem I am raising that instructors in such classes can hope to implement with the blessing of the higher-ups? Of course not. Having to revise--and even rewrite--goes with the territory. And students do want to know what grade they are likely to get in the end. It is, after all, what most of them care about--because even if their elders have the luxury of smarmily telling them "It's not what grade you get, it's what you learn!" no one will much care "what they learned" if their grade point average slips below the minimum threshold required by their scholarship, or if they fail the class and are required to take it over again, perhaps paying a stiff financial penalty on top of the setback involved in taking the class the second time around. Indeed, a poor grade may mean enough hardship that they have to drop out of school--in which case, there goes their chance to learn something.

Admitting that I do see, if not a solution, then at least a way in which we could be doing better, specifically that it would not all be so stressful were students not sent in as underprepared for college academically and in other ways as they have tended to be, a problem exacerbated by the reality of the credentialing crisis that people in authority seem happy to go on feeding (and giving economists Nobel Prizes for justifying); were a college education not so expensive and thus so precarious for so many; perhaps, were our grading systems less punitive.

Alas, such things lie far, far outside the purview of anyone likely to be teaching an actual composition course.