Grades

Bloom discusses how grading can be disadvantageous for students and focuses the first part of her essay on the problems that grading presents and how they can be be misleading.  I know a few professors, here, at CSUDH who would agree with Bloom.  How does a teacher accurately grade a written essay without being subjective or even bias?   We are all taught to read text “objectively” but more often than we read text subjectively and we all interpret and re-construct their meanings differently.  

Grades also tend to label students not just their papers.  Many students, including me at one time,    fall into that habit of labeling themselves as “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “F”, students based on the marks or grades they receive on their papers.  I see this labeling in the junior high school students I tutor.  Now I know motivation is a factor, but one of the students I tutor after school refuses to revise a history paper because he has been labeled and believes he is just a D student.  In other cases, some college students I know who have been “A” students or writers before college became utterly devastated when their writing instructors gave them their first C or D.