Grading final exams is downright torturous sometimes. As many have posted recently, the onslaught of grading and commenting in the final weeks of the semester often means that the time pressures overshadow good teaching, and perhaps even thoughtful assessment.

And while that can certainly be true, I am also struck by a kind of human drama that it contains. As I am reading these exams, I understand that for many students, something really important hinges on what gets written under pressure in that two hour window.

In some cases, reading these can be a joy: seeing students make connections and draw out themes that actually go beyond what we discussed in class elicits a joyful "yes!" from me--not only do I derive a certain kind of pleasure from seeing a new connection made, but I am also professionally gratified that I am in part teaching these students more than just the material, but how to handle the material on their own.

And of course there are the students who can spin out 100 words that mention a major theme we discussed in class, but do nothing with it. They make up the big middle of the class, and it's easy to keep an emotional distance from their plights--the work is easy to evaluate because it fits so neatly into the kind of grading rubrics we can construct for ourselves.

It is the test case that gets maddening. I've just graded the exam of a student who struggle through much of the first part of the semester, but just after midterm, seemed to step it up: His final paper was a huge improvement (and clearly HIS improvement, since those kinds of leaps always raise little red plagiarism flags), and his contribution to a solid group project at the end of the class left me hopeful about his exam. So as I read it, I realize that while he's mentioning ideas more sophisticated than many of his peers are, he's not explaining any of them with any thoroughness. Each questtion, then brings a glimmer of hope and expectation based on the right keywords and ideas, but always is followed by this almost unnamebale feeling: the one that inspires amateur bowlers to tilt to the left as the will their bowling balls in that direction. I want to "will" his answers into more detail, but in the end, they're jsut the reight keywords, not an actual thoughtful answer. At the end of his exam, he's earned just a mid-C, and I know he's capable of so much more.

I was once told that while we can try to assess on talent, potential, or effort, the only honest assessment can be based on actual acheivement. At moments like this, when you want to bring a student from potential into acheivement merely with the force of a readerly will, that's a hard pill to swallow, and a hard bit of honesty to own up to.