Page 654 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
the final. I hope that that makes things easier for you. Enough of that. Let’s get back to today’s subject.”
In fairness, the concern with exams was quite understandable: The grades in each lecture course were almost entirely dependent upon per- formance on the final examination (classroom participation could also be taken into account, but not to the extent that a grade, having been first blindly assigned, could be changed by more than one half-letter— and then for no more than five students—once the registrar disclosed the names behind the four-digit identifiers that were placed on each exam). And grades affected standing, which, in turn, shaped resumes, which led, or obstructed the path, to jobs. That was a point that did not escape me (notwithstanding my telling the students that I would spread out their submissions on the floor and let Gus make the decisions).
Those grades were so important that, on no fewer than five occa- sions over the years, I was compelled by the administration to meet with a complaining student for what seemed like an hour (remember, I also had a “real” job to attend to) and go over the whole exam and my scoring methods, usually when the discussion centered on something akin to the difference between a B and a B+. Students were entitled to such ses- sions just for the asking. In one instance, the administration outdid itself, but saved me time, when an assistant dean pleaded with me (leaned on me?) to elevate an otherwise-Dean’s-List student’s grade because she had done so much better in other classes than in mine. (There are a multitude of times in life when I have refused to budge when a matter of real principle was involved; this one missed the cut.)
My problem was to find a way to score the tests so that I would have confidence in the resulting hierarchy, a problem that was compounded by the virtually impenetrable rules that prescribed the maximum and minimum number of As, A–s, B+s, Bs . . . Fs that could be given out in a class the size of mine. Thus, over the years, I learned to hone my essay questions and score the responses so that no two numerical results would be identical. Using my system of rewards and punishments, I would come up with a range of raw scores from as low as 11 points (the student had put some ink on the page) to as high as 162, but they never
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