A few weeks ago my Literary Criticism class was discussing Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" and the notion of the intentional fallacy. Along the way, the idea of ownership of writing came up and so I asked them a question that threw them for the proverbial loop: "What if I were to collect your papers without names on them, and then -- after grading them all individually -- averaged the grades and gave everyone the same class average grade? How would things change?"

At first, the response was incredulity. "That wouldn't be fair," sums up the initial reaction. Naturally, those who assumed that they would get A's and B's were hostile to the idea, because the "average" would pull their grades down. But I asked them again -- "How would things change?" Some puzzlement followed. Someone eventually forwarded the idea that people might start working together or collaborating to raise the average. That was where I wanted to take them: into thinking about how texts produce social relations, as much as they are the products of individual labor. But the conversation took some interesting turns. "Would our grades be higher than the grades of a High School class?" one student asked. I didn't quite understand their logic, but I puzzled out the assumption behind it: that college students are inherently "better" writers than high school students (which isn't always true). The issue the student raised, though, was one of standardization: how, ideally, grades should mean the same thing across different classes and schools.

At the end of the talk, I added another twist to their thinking. "How do you think my grading of your papers would change?" Although some were wondering how I would be able to have any standards of comparison, some students posited that the grading might actually be more fair, since I would be grading based on the writing alone. I noted how this was the exact opposite of their initial reaction about how anonymous grading wouldn't be fair.

The chatter about grading took us back to the fact that some works of literature are "anonymous" yet they are still highly valued, even though we have a tendency to worship at the altar in a "cult of authorship" in our culture. I mentioned an interesting magazine I'm familiar with called Nemonymous, which keeps the authors it publishes anonymous until the following issue. Such discussion opened their eyes to the assumptions we make about authorship -- and authority.

Near the end of the hour, we found ourselves back on the grading question: "I still don't understand how that grading system could work," a student said.

"It'd work. It's simple...you'd all get C's."

The response was a collective "Eh?"

"A 'C' means 'average,' right? So if I were averaging the class grade every time I collected a paper, you'd all get a C. Heck, I wouldn't even have to read them!"

Class dismissed.

Obviously, a "C" doesn't always mean average. Even when teachers curve grades, the bell curve leans forward to a B at most institutions, thanks to grade inflation and other factors. Depending on how you apply grading standards, the class average could very well be an A+. Plus there are many different ways of grading collective work, beyond just averaging them all on an assumed bell curve.

The issue of grading collectively is an interesting one to me. I often have students do a lot of collaborative work and group projects, and the methods for grading them often come back to this issue of grading the individual vs. grading the group.

Evergreen College hosts a great collection of articles on assessment of collaborative work. In Roger Arango's contribution, "Group Projects and Group Grading", he explains that while some students might think it is unfair to give every student in a group the same grade if one person doesn't contribute, students need to learn that this is how it works in the real world, where the outcomes of group work are all that matter. Arango offers several strategies for getting students to "buy in" to the notion of a group grade, but it mostly comes down to spending time explaining the responsibilities of everyone in the group, and making students responsible to one another for the outcome of the group project. He also offers various grading schemata, which might include combining individual grades with group grades in the assessment, as a way of rewarding the students who seem to carry most of the weight.

In my Freshman Composition class last week, students gave a group presentation, leading the class through a discussion of an assigned reading. One student in the group didn't say a word the whole time. He's shy and very anxious when it comes to public speaking. But he also was responsible for drafting the questions that were used for the presentation, and made a really nice handout for the class to work with. I have to balance his individual work outside of class against his contributions to the group during the class. There are times like these when it becomes difficult to assess group grades, because -- in this case -- the outcome was a success. Should I punish the group as a whole for not more actively bringing the silent student into the conversation? Should I reward him for doing more preparatory work than the others, who performed "live" during the class discussion? Am I really prepared to give some students higher grades for, at bottom, being more extroverted? Although I want to reward the entire group for successfully getting my whole class interested in discussing the text, this is a case where a collective group grade would actually solve the dilemma, because part of the task of working as a team is to work for the benefit of every member of the group ("All for one, and one for all!"), even to the extent of risking one's own individual grade and expected reward.

Kathleen McKinney offers more Tips for Grading Group Work, which I might integrate into my Composition class' group projects. Chief among them is asking them to write a report about group performance, and even asking them to grade themselves.

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