Musings on marking

'It's strange,' said the Physio, 'because the rest of the time you are such a nice, kind person. But when you are marking, you just won't give your students the benefit of the doubt'.


I suppose this is true. Although if I'm inclined towards a mark of 59% and there’s half a possibility it could become a 60%, then I’ll give 60%. (This would move the students up from 2.2 into the 2.1 bracket). I did this with a dissertation last week. In fact, I had to argue the second marker up to 60%. But with my current first year students, who are struggling to get out of the 40s, no, I'm not inclined to magic them up to 50%. For some of them, I struggle to give a passing mark of 40%. And, unlike some other institutions, there is no pressure at Naval City University to pass a failing student. If they fail, then it's unfortunate, but they do fail.

I want them to do well. And I am fully prepared to go out of my way to help them, if they seek help. I have written in to the unit I am co-ordinating this semester three seminars on approaching different parts of the exam so that when they are finally assessed, they have already had some formative feedback (the unit mark is based wholly on one examination – this would not have been my choice of assessment, but I inherited the unit). So, offer help, I will. But I don’t think that giving students good marks for poor work will help them. I actually think that picking them up on poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and paragraphing, and on woolly thinking and sloppy argument, whilst they are in the first year and their marks don't count, is the kindest thing I can do. They might then learn from their mistakes in time to put them right before the marks really do start to count. I think they have been allowed to 'get away with' such errors for too long at school, and in allowing this, their schools (and the exam boards at GCSE and A level) have let them down very badly. I don't intend to let them down in this way, if I can help it.

Naval City University gives students a compulsory unit in Study Skills for University in which we teach them how to approach writing essays, but it is a unit some students do not take seriously. They think they already know how to do it because they got a B for A level (in some cases an A!). Many of those students didn't pass the unit.

I don't expect students to be thinking and writing at first class university level when they first arrive – those are skills they develop throughout their three years at university – but they should be able to write coherent sentences. The students whose essays I fail can't do this. They really struggle to express themselves. And now they are being marked on the 'whole piece of work' – what and how they write – rather than what I think they ought to be trying to say, their marks have fallen substantially, and many of them really struggle to understand why.

On one level, it might be considered kind of me to massage their marks so they don’t fail. But I think this sort of 'kindness' is why so many of them are genuinely surprised – and distressed – by their low marks. If they get good marks for poor work, they won't try to improve it. I'm sure that they are bright young people, but they need to learn how to express their ideas coherently, not just in order to get a 2.1 degree, but so that after university they can make themselves clearly understood, present a coherent argument at business meetings, or – if they go into teaching – teach children how to write well to avoid perpetuating this cycle.

Giving a fair, but sometimes low, mark for their work and giving feedback explaining how to do it better is the only way to encourage improvement. University is about more than just producing the 'right answer' to get the top marks, and I think I would be failing in my job if I don't at least try to help them to think, and express themselves, more clearly.