On Grades

It's grade season for Thai students and I try to think of appropriate ways to let students know what their progress is as the semester comes to an end. The first time I handed back an assignment I put their scores and comments on individual slips of paper and handed them back to the students. Doing this was a total waste of time. Here I thought I was doing them a favor by keeping their scores private. Privacy is nothing here. They spent more time exchanging slips of paper with their grades than they did contemplating their own score. It was like we were all eating together at a Chinese restaurant and we were all looking at each other's fortune cookies. Oohh! What does yours say?? I don't understand it. My teachers and professors came up with ways to keep my grades completely discreet using ID number codes, cover sheets, online passwords. Today I had the spreadsheet with grades for the students for them to see at the end of class. They truly don't care that their name and grades are in plain sight for everyone. It was on a single piece of paper and by the end of class I had 35 kids crowded around me trying to see the page, each copying down their own scores and then the scores of all their friends. One of the students said, "Maybe you can put this on the overhead?" My goodness I would be mortified to have my grades posted on an overhead projector.

They just think about grades differently. They are all in each other's business and they think of it more like winning lottery numbers than anything that's actually correlated with their skill or work put in. I had two students ask me after class, "So you give me?" "Give you what?," I asked. "Grade A for semester?" "If you do well on your presentation and your final, your score might be high enough for an A..." "Give me A!" "If you practice your presentation this weekend and then study hard for the final exam and you should be fine." "You will be really nice to give me A, maybe a little bit nice and you give me B. Anything C or better is good for me." Yes, because it all depends on how nice I am. I sometimes forget these are college students. If I went to a professor and asked them to be nice and give me an A... it's just too absurd to even think of what would happen. I shooed these two students out of the classroom as they shuffled backward into the hallway smiling and saying, "A! A! Ok? Ok? A for me!"

Never a dull moment.