I find it difficult to believe that someone’s grade can be determined by the feelings of others. It has been an issue that I’ve dealt with for a lot of my educational life. Subjectivity is basically when someone uses their own personal perspective to judge another. Objectivity is when there’s only one perspective of something. It’s the difference between thinking internally and externally. Something that has always bugged me was that subjectivity is used in a majority of grading throughout educational systems, and this is something that I believe to be extremely flawed.
Math is one thing where 2 + 2 will always equal 4. This is a case of objectivity, where externally there is only one clear cut answer. This way, everyone is graded evenly. When you write an English paper, the teacher grades it based off of a “rubric” that has different requirements. But are these requirements universally interpreted in the same way? That’s the issue here. I could not find many studies to help support this topic, but I can claim without reluctance that subjectivity happens all the time throughout every school. Including to myself.
I took a psychology class last semester in high school where we learned all about subjective grading. I learned that there are many things that can affect the grading of someone’s paper. For instance, if the teacher is feeling ill that day, they might not review a paper thoroughly enough, which will affect the outcome of that person’s grade. If a teacher really favors a student, they might be more lenient on the grading. To me, I think that that is extremely unfair. Graders do not have the same mindset as every other grader, which means that different outcomes are extremely likely in grades.
What can be done about this? Realistically, nothing can be done. An English paper is never going to be 2 + 2. Unless graders are universally trained to think exactly the same when it comes to grading written assignments, subjectivity will be present everywhere. This greatly affected me throughout my educational career, not always in a bad way but it has been bad in many experiences. People grade differently based off of what they are feeling at the moment. So how is that remotely fair to the student? What can possibly be done to help train graders to think the same way? It’s an extremely difficult case to overcome, and it most likely never will be solved. But it’s something to take account in. If you, the readers, believe that you received a grade on your paper that you didn’t deserve, chances are you’re correct.
Sources:
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Objective_vs_Subjective
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Subjectivity
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/subjectivity
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Objectivity
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5-ae3zp8eaE/UE1H90BL3JI/AAAAAAAAAMk/_kB1cCNuaOM/s1600/Resizedd_subjective-by-michael-kloran.jpg
Rebecca,
I wrote this blog passionately because I too experienced unfair things in high school from my English teachers. Whenever they seemed to be upset with personal reasons it seemed to reflect in my papers. I knew this was unfair, and in my psychology class I learned that there is virtually nothing us as students can do about it. It’s extremely unjust and I wish there was something that could be done. It’s everywhere, even in college.
I have always been aware of the issue of subjectivity in the grading system, but I have never looked at it from a scientific perspective before. It is extremely unfair to students who are susceptible to this, even if it works for their benefit. The mood of the teacher and the events happening in their life is completely out of the student’s control, even though they are the ones who suffer from the results. In my high school, there was an English teacher who was going through a divorce and many family issues, and took out all of her anger and frustration on her students. Having friends in her class, I saw how unjust her grading was and how she often assigned ridiculous and unfair work and papers to do. This jeopardized their grades, and since it was junior year, it could have had serious consequences by affecting their GPAs for colleges to look at. As you said, it does not seem like their is any way to fix this; we would have to control external conflicts and people’s emotions. This article (http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2009/10/grading_of_students_too_subjec.html) discusses subjective grading further, and includes some ways that will not entirely fix the problem, but can definitely help. Check it out!