Getting good grades

Pick a number between 1 and 99.

Dear Students,

I hope you’re feeling ready for the return to classes, after what looks to everyone else like a long Christmas break but which we know has been a busy time of finishing and submitting assessments (you), and marking those assessments (us).

And there it is, already. You, and us. We spend a whole semester trying to foster an atmosphere of equality and mutual respect, in which we all have different experiences of life and of reading and writing yet can all have our voices heard… and then you give me a piece of writing and I hurl it back at you with a number attached. The power dynamics implicit in the teacher/student relationship, and in the structures of expertise that a university is built on, are suddenly made very explicit.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with this. I’m increasingly drawn to writing/learning contexts which are not founded on assessments or scoring or a success/failure paradigm (e.g. this email) and you may have noticed that my notes on feedback were emphatically not about scoring a piece of work.

And yet: some pieces of writing are more complete, more finished, more accomplished, more faithful to the arc of their own intention than others. It is possible – although fraught with challenge and with unspoken assumptions – to assess a piece of writing and make measured observations about it. And if you’re at university because you want a certificate at the end then you are asking for your work to be scored in this way. It’s absolutely a part of the contract between us. I don’t like it, you don’t like it; but for the time being we’re playing along.

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In the past, I’ve taken new cohorts of MA creative writing students on a walking tour of bookish Nottingham. I’ve taken them to the Bromley House library, to Five Leaves Bookshop, to Nottingham Contemporary and the Broadway Cinema. I’ve shown them the best (in my humble and correct opinion) coffee-shops and pizza places, and I’ve introduced them to Nottingham City of Literature, Nottingham Writers’ Studio, and Writing East Midlands. These are the places you might find your people, I’ve told them. These are the places you can spend time, read, listen, and see what chance encounters might arise. If you’re going to study in Nottingham, then have a go at being in Nottingham.

I’ve also, almost as an afterthought, taken them to the Cartwheel coffee roastery, where Alex has led us through a coffee tasting session. This coffee is nicer (fruitier, spicier, more complex, more balanced, more….?) than that coffee. This coffee came from the same bean as that coffee but the different roasting technique has produced a different end result. He’s talked us through the detailed evaluation process a qualified coffee taster goes through, and shown us how this process leads to a numerical score.

Your experience of a cup of coffee, I point out to the students, is subjective, nuanced, and complicated. And yet here Alex has come up with a numerical score that his peers will respect and accept. The 92.5 coffee is better than the 89.2.

And thus I introduce my students to metaphor.

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I didn’t teach last term, and so I haven’t been doing actual marking this month. But I am moderating my colleagues’ marking (one of the essential checks and balances in the system, and a key thing I look for is the correlation between the written feedback and the numerical grade. The feedback is by far the more important element. What does the marker think you were trying to do with this piece? Where is it working well, and why? Where does it need more development, and in what way? Who might you read to help you think further about this style or technique or approach? What, again, is a comma splice? And in writing that feedback, the marker can begin to map their response to your work against a set of broad categories: the student’s work shows excellent/very good/good/some clarity of intention (where clarity of intention might be understood as, ‘I get this story, I can process it, I can see what you’re aiming at.’) Those excellent/very good/good/some descriptors translate into grade boundaries and are, when you think about it, pretty clearly distinct. There is a clear difference between an ‘excellent’ handling of perspective and a ‘very good’ one. There just is.

The marker considers the technical achievement – the grammar, syntax, punctuation, and the lesser-defined qualities of sentence-making. They look at the use of techniques discussed in class – point of view, handling of time, dialogue, narrative perspective – and the use of form, the originality, the sense of ambition and accomplishment. And as they build up a list of ‘excellents’, ‘goods’, and ‘very goods’, a numerical grade naturally emerges.

And those marks are moderated, and approved by exam boards, and overseen by external examiners, and fed into a process that leads to a graduation day with cheering parents and hats thrown into the air, and everyone is happy and satisfied.

And yet, of course. And yet.

When the placement students first start working for The Letters Page and reading submissions, I immediately have to train them out of this numerical understanding of quality; this sense of placing writing somewhere on a scale. When we’re selecting work for publication, I tell them, there are two grades: yes, and no. And almost everything – because we are sent far more work than we can publish – will score a no.

When editors assess the work of new writers, they never ask to see the degree certificates, or the marks transcripts. They read the work.

When we read a new book, we might form an opinion of that book’s qualities but we don’t generally give it a numerical rating. (Or we do, in which case we’re probably users of this contested site.)

I don’t know if grading creative work is helpful, in the long run. I do know that it can be done with care, and rigour, and as much even-handedness as flakey human brains can aspire to. And I do think that the university’s current model of qualification requires a measure of assessment. But I think it’s fairly apparent that these numbers will not help you to develop your writing. We develop our writing by doing more of it, and by listening carefully to other people’s responses to it, and by patiently working out how to hew a little closer to the original outlines of our imagination’s design.

Next week: what are the original outlines of our imagination’s design? (Or: where do we get our ideas from?)

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Homework:

In my last Notes, I invited you to send me a very short story (500 words max), with an offer to demonstrate to you* what my idea of feedback looks like. I replied to most people who sent something, but definitely not all, so I’m repeating the offer this week.

And/or if you have any questions you’d like me to address in future Class Notes, send those along as well.

Class dismissed.

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(*Caveat: if a lot of people take up this offer, I won’t reply to everyone. But I do promise that if I have to choose I’ll choose at random; so if you don’t get feedback there is no implied judgment on your work. I promise.)

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