I am taking a break from grading essay exams. I have this giant pile of material I must plow through. Give a couple of dozen graduate students a couple of hours and they can generate a lot of stuff. Some responses were generated using a word processor and printed. Some were hand written. I think I should be able to deduct points for poor penpersonship, but then I would not want to be evaluated on the penmanship employed in my evaluative comments so I resist. I have my scoring rubric (not to be confused with that weird multi-colored toy that was popular some years ago) generated and am doing my best.
I think it would be helpful if students would also provide some type of structure for me. It would be helpful if the content that actually reflects an attempt to answer the question would be differentiated from the content that was provided as a filler. I hate having to try to guess which is which. I have two interpretations of this student behavior and I am never certain which is fair.
The first interpretation I call the “I learned this stuff and I want to use it at least once” explanation. I have a more positive reaction when I use this interpretation. This interpretation implies that students know some of what they are writing is not relevant, but find some satisfaction in filling up pages with course related information. “Go ahead”, I think.”I don’t mind skimming this stuff if it makes you feel good.”
Then there is the “the answer must be here somewhere” interpretation. When I reach this conclusion, I admit to feeling annoyed. I would like to be able to subtract annoyance points. I often try to determine if students can apply some of the ideas we have covered. I have always understood that this was kind of the goal. So, I ask questions that offer scenarios and ask for a response that proposes a course of action with justification or an interpretation based on a perspective, model or theory. What I sometimes get is a memory dump of all information generated by the reference to the perspective, model or theory. As a psychologist, attempting to evaluate such responses reminds of the assumptions associated with the Rorchach test. I think it assumes the answer will emerge if I spend enough time staring at this ambiguous content. I must know the answer so I should be able to find it in there somewhere. Maybe if I stared longer something would emerge. However, I often reach my tolerance for ambiguity limit before I achieve the vision of an answer and I begin to decorate the page with large Xs. Sorry, but this is my way of avoiding subtracting annoyance points.
OK – I feel better now. Back to searching for meaning in essay responses.