Why Your Instructor Grades As She Does

How This Accident Happened?

What’s the Big Difference between Bosses and Professors in Junior and Senior Courses and between the Prior Instructors (Including Me) That You May Have Had and How Can This Grading Method Reveal What They Will See in Your Work?

How Does This Apply to This Class?

 

If you want, hear what’s written below: Why does your instructor grade as she does?

How This Accident Happened?

I wish I could say that I thought of this method of grading. It is an accident. About seven or eight years ago, I started having some students write stuff totally unsupported by any reliable source I had ever seen. I refused to judge students on their politics or feelings so I had to find an alternative. I began saying that students’ evidence had to come ONLY:

·         From the textbook that the History Department chose, not me. (It is a very honorable source.)

·         From things I wrote and I put in the course–and, if I made an error, we could both work it through and I would change my link.

 

I could have used any source of evidence to grade by but the students already the textbook so the textbook was an ideal source of facts and therefore of evidence for what you wrote. To reduce my time, I began opening the textbook to the content for a question and to grade all the answers to the same question at one time. (Click here for a visual of how I do that.)

 

Doing that stopped the political problems, but I also began to see how students worked with a source. More and more I saw that how they were working would never produce what:

·         A professor would expect in junior and senior courses

·         A boss would require to get and keep a good job, especially that required the worker to figure out things

 

To me that was a tragic—and I mean the word—waste of people who were smart enough to do the work but who had methods (how they were working) that kept them from succeeding. It is not only a waste of these students, but also those limits on their success made life harder for their families and their communities, and—in a global market place—it made our nation less competitive.

What’s the Big Difference between Bosses and Professors in Junior and Senior Courses and between the Prior Instructors (Including Me) That You May Have Had and How Can This Grading Method Reveal What They Will See in Your Work?

I am a generalist in history. I know a lot about the whole period of United States History. I have some expert knowledge in a few periods, but I have not kept up in the field since graduate school because I wanted to teach in the community college and to help community college students succeed. Scholarship matters to me, but teaching matters more. Many teachers in freshman and sophomore programs are similar to me in that respect.

 

Bosses and professors in a university are experts:

·         Bosses are experts in their fields whether they own the company or not.

·         Professors in a university teach but their focus is scholarship and helping to create new experts in their field (and sometimes keeping students out of their fields if they do not think those students are suitable).

 

If you look at those 5 Requirements for Evidence for This Course, bosses and professors in a university will know instantly if you violate those basic requirements. By grading your evidence compared to the source you were to use (as that visual showed), I can:

·         Easily see what an expert can see

·         Easily prove your errors (Or, if I am wrong, you can show me how I am wrong--and I am fine with that.)

 

You will be judged by experts for the remainder of your life and, if you do well, you also need to learn to be an expert at something. With experts and success in the real world, evidence is everything.

 

Click here for How Does This Grading Method Apply to This Class?

 

 

Copyright C. J. Bibus, Ed.D. 2003-2013

 

WCJC Department:

History – Dr. Bibus

Contact Information:

281.239.1577 or bibusc@wcjc.edu

Last Updated:

2013

WCJC Home:

http://www.wcjc.edu/