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The past few weeks have been pretty intense (I've been awfully busy ever since I got back from my conference), but my grades are finally in and the semester's over. I've very much enjoyed this first year at Alma, but it's fantastic to be done. (Now I get to catch my breath for a month before my summer research student starts.)
Turning in those final grades is often an agonizing process, though. When I'm setting the final scale for each course, I know that I need to avoid grade inflation and keep my distribution reasonable: the college expects that of me, and I want to reward my best students with a grade that really means something. But in any reasonably large class, there are inevitably places where I have to draw a line at some arbitrary point between students whose grades aren't all that different. So I sit and stare and look for reasons to cut things off at one point rather than another. I always wind up with a set of grades that I'm okay with, but I'm ever so slightly haunted by the handful of people whom I left on the edge.
Turning in those final grades is often an agonizing process, though. When I'm setting the final scale for each course, I know that I need to avoid grade inflation and keep my distribution reasonable: the college expects that of me, and I want to reward my best students with a grade that really means something. But in any reasonably large class, there are inevitably places where I have to draw a line at some arbitrary point between students whose grades aren't all that different. So I sit and stare and look for reasons to cut things off at one point rather than another. I always wind up with a set of grades that I'm okay with, but I'm ever so slightly haunted by the handful of people whom I left on the edge.
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