<p>Season Eggleston</p><p>ENGL 102 – 008</p><p>02 September 2008</p><p>Tarnished Gold</p><p>It all started with a gold star, a single sticker next to your name. The gold star set the gold standard which depending on how the teacher felt, changed. The standard has the potential to change due to feelings, home environment, friends, co-workers all have an influence over how a teacher grades. Since grading is up to the teacher’s discretions, does that mean that hard work plays a supporting role to feelings? Different methods are utilized in measuring how well you following the given guidelines of the instructor, mainly on tests and papers. The instructor then grades the test and paper and assigns a grade accordingly. The grading of research papers, essays, presentations, etc. is predominantly subjective. There can’t even be an agreement what makes for a good presentation, is standing up there rattling off facts like a machine better then someone who makes a power point and reads the slides? Both are presentations, one is boring to watch but shows knowledge while the other one is eye catching but does not demonstrate a person’s knowledge. What is really being a graded, presentation or knowledge? </p><p>It has been claimed that subjective grading can be made objective through the use of rubrics. A rubric is a set of criteria and standards used to structure the grading process. There are </p><p>100 points possible on a paper, five sections each worth 25 points each; for example on an </p><p>English paper style, voice, grammar, clarity and effectiveness would be the five sections. Even though the overall grade is based on a rubric of what each section should contain, there is still subjectivity at play for the grade assigned to each section. The teacher overall has the final say of how well we follow their rules. So how is subjectivity solved by creating a rubric? It’s not. Dividing one made up mark into 5 made up marks and adding them up does not make this process objective. How does the grader decide what gets a 4 and what gets a 5? Furthermore, the process of developing the rubric is completely subjective. Why does content get 10 points instead of 9 or 11? Why does bibliography get 5? </p><p>Why doesn’t originality get points? Why don’t I get points for being poetic? I agree that rubrics help structure grading and might even facilitate discussion of the grades, but anybody who thinks that combining a bunch of subjective grades in a subjective way will magically create an objective grade is delusional. Grading is like playing a game when only one person knows the rules. You only get the find out the rules when you do something wrong. </p>