How faculty screw up students by (not) grading

A friend had a Facebook status message that I can easily relate to:

the downside of giving tests to students - you got to correct them, groan :(

One of those occasions when I can easily join with "amen, sister!"

I often joke with students that I will gladly teach even if they do not pay me.  I will keep reading and writing even if I am not paid.  But, grading?  That is the only professional activity for which I get paid, and not enough of it either.  (There is no amount of money they can ever pay me to go to all those insanely painful and stupid meetings, however!)

One place where we mess up is with grading--or the lack of it.  Evaluating students' understanding is a tough task.

Early on in my career, I decided against multiple-choice, true-false, ... type questions.  I tell my students that I want to make sure that they have figured out how to think through the context I give them because that is a critical ingredient to success in life.  This means that I get to listen to them in the classrooms, and read a lot of what they have written about.  Carefully reading their papers and then giving feedback on what worked in their thinking, and what didn't, and in the process whether they demonstrated well their writing abilities ... that is a lot of work.

An essay in Academe urges faculty to tighten up their evaluation frameworks, and that "it is time for the faculties of American colleges and universities to take teaching—and their students’ futures—more seriously."

Despite the annoyance it may engender among students, conscientious grading plays an important role in fostering student learning. Students feel compelled to study more when they believe that the grades they receive will reflect genuine mastery of the subject matter. The psychology professors Basil Johnson and Hall Beck of Appalachian State University demonstrated that students who expected tough grading significantly outperformed students who expected lenient grades on examinations in eleven sections of an educational psychology course. ...
At the college level, examination of grade distributions in prerequisite courses that are delivered in multiple sections and are regularly followed by multiple ensuing courses reveals a similar relationship between rigorous grading and learning outcomes. ...
The lesson is clear: teachers should not cater to perceived student preferences for gain (high grades) without pain (the investment of time and intellect required to master substantive course material).

I have heard enough horror stories from students on how much they never received detailed feedback from their isntructors, or how much they have received inflated grades for the work they themselves consider plain Bullshit.

A couple of terms ago, a student brought me one of her papers from another class, and showed me how much she had bullshitted her way through the paper.  It was clear from the professor's evaluation of the paper that he had not read the student's paper, but had awarded a high grade nonetheless. 

I then turned to the rest of the class--about twenty students in the class--and asked them for their experiences.  They all thought I was being stupid by asking the obvious, whether students Bullshit and faculty Bullshit a lot more.  We had some quite some conversation--laughing at ourselves--but left me horribly disappointed with the state of higher education.

It is depressingly ironical that most of these awful faculty are also almost the ones who think any serious discussion of teaching and learning is useless. (I bet they don't read publications like Academe either.)  A full-professor once told me, as we were nearing the restrooms: "we all have PhDs and we know how to teach. Nobody needs to tell us how to teach."  I so much wanted to explain to him that having a PhD doesn't say anything at all about our teaching skills, but I followed Socrates' advice not to argue with fools.  I told him that I had a restroom emergency, and was thankful he didn't follow me into the stalls :)

I better get back to the grading now!