The Grade Meeting

I’ve been attending end-of-programme grade meetings since I started in this job seven-and-a-half years ago and the sense of gravity and responsibility never leaves, even though the volume of students to grade and the length and tone of the meeting varies significantly from semester to semester.

There is something in it that makes me think of surgery, each student’s academic labours dissected by spreadsheet, while we consider averages and criteria and near-misses and their possibilities.  The numbers that each teacher has crunched are crunched again.

In general I think we give generous consideration to each student whose marks place them on a border or line of one kind or another, but I think too about the difference between what’s at stake for those we’re putting through a final cold evaluation and what’s at stake for us in doing this, which in the short term isn’t too much.

Most frustrating of all are the marks of those to whom we’ve signalled, early on, that changes need in all likelihood to be made in order to pass, only to see the result when the changes have been made too late, incompletely, or not at all.  Educationalists might well note the elements of self-fulfilling prophecy in this, and I wonder at it too.

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