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You asked about my teaching, and I mentioned in answering how much I continue to love every aspect of our profession; you were a bit surprised, I think, when I said that this even includes grading papers! I thought you might like to see the little Breviary I have used over the years; as you can perhaps deduce from the “Table of Symbols”, grading becomes something of a detective game for me, as I attempt to ferret out and then classify the wide range of my students’ mistakes. There is something about dissecting their problems I find appealing; maybe I should have been a pathologist!
As for how I actually go about assigning grades, the following explanations of what each mark means are taken from a handout I always distribute the first day of class in my Honors Great Books Seminars:
A. This is an essay that demonstrates a real mastery of both readings and discussions; the author’s claims are well-grounded in quotations from the books, and connections are made where appropriate to points considered in class; the paper is imaginative and provocative in its approach and thorough in its presentation; it is focused throughout on a single idea, clearly introduced and faithfully pursued, and it contains very few, if any, grammatical, logical, or mechanical errors. It is a pleasure to read.
B. This is an essay that is more or less logically and grammatically sound, with fewer than ten stylistic errors or infelicities; it is enriched by quotations from the readings and by allusions to class discussion, though these are not as well integrated into the argument as in an “A” paper; the author says nothing that is really wrong, but the approach is pedestrian and the interpretation is lacking in genuine insight. This is a solid piece of work, but it takes no risks and is rather boring.
C. This is an essay that has possibilities, but it fails to bring those possibilities to fruition; the reader has a vague sense of where it is heading, or at least wants to head, but it is out of control: the syntax breaks down with disappointing regularity, there are conceptual inconsistencies (“x” is said on p. 1, but then the very opposite, “not-x”, is affirmed on p. 3), and the mechanics tend to be sloppy, with frequent formatting, typographical, and spelling errors. The underbrush of mistakes is so thick that reading is laborious.
D. This is an essay that shows every sign of having been thrown together at the last minute; foolish mistakes make it clear that the author has not read the books carefully; the writing is all over the map, and one searches in vain to find a single line of thought or thread of argument; the presentation is disfigured throughout by mechanical errors, to say nothing of syntactical and interpretive problems. The paper, in short, is slipshod, unintelligent, and unimaginative, and it is truly painful to read.
F. This grade is ordinarily reserved for an essay that fails to appear by the deadline announced in the syllabus, though on very rare occasions it is affixed to a piece of writing that is so abysmally bad as to have been better had it never been composed.