I found it increasingly horrible to be responsible for a portion of my students' GPAs, especially knowing that some of them wanted to go to med school or law school, or were trying to get into the School of Education or the School of Journalism (both of which, on the UW-Madison campus, are highly competitive). I didn't want to judge them, and I didn't like the fact that my judgment of their performance (based on nothing more than a midterm, a final, two papers, and in-class participation--and this when I might be teaching 60 or more students a semester) might have some very direct bearing on whether or not they would be able to pursue their particular dream.
Also, of course, I hated the inevitable conflict with students who thought they should get higher grades than they in fact earned (I had one student, my first semester of teaching, tell me that he shouldn't have gotten a B because "a B is an average grade and this is an above-average paper." Which it wasn't.) I hated having students crying in my office. I hated being the bad guy, and the grade-based system of education means that, yes, I was the bad guy a lot.
I hated the way students fixated on grades and the way their intense anxiety about same interfered with their ability to learn. (In revisions, for example they would get focused on trying to give me what they thought I wanted--answering my feedback at the most literal level--instead of trying to understand the principle of argumentation (or whatever) that I was trying to teach them.) And I hated it especially because I was mostly teaching English to non-English majors; they didn't have any reason to be there BESIDE the grade, and that made it really hard on all of us.
(The other side of the coin is that I was just as utterly, miserably grade-obsessed as any of them, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student--it's very easy for overachievers (like me) to get obsessed with the external validation of a 4.0 and thus miss the point of education in the first place. But I still have anxiety dreams, four years after finishing my Ph.D. and almost ten years after the last course I took for a grade, about messing up my GPA. And the fact that I never did, that I maintained a 4.0 all the way through, is something that in retrospect I think would have been better honored in the breach.)
I don't know if any of this is helpful to you--I hope so.
no subject
I found it increasingly horrible to be responsible for a portion of my students' GPAs, especially knowing that some of them wanted to go to med school or law school, or were trying to get into the School of Education or the School of Journalism (both of which, on the UW-Madison campus, are highly competitive). I didn't want to judge them, and I didn't like the fact that my judgment of their performance (based on nothing more than a midterm, a final, two papers, and in-class participation--and this when I might be teaching 60 or more students a semester) might have some very direct bearing on whether or not they would be able to pursue their particular dream.
Also, of course, I hated the inevitable conflict with students who thought they should get higher grades than they in fact earned (I had one student, my first semester of teaching, tell me that he shouldn't have gotten a B because "a B is an average grade and this is an above-average paper." Which it wasn't.) I hated having students crying in my office. I hated being the bad guy, and the grade-based system of education means that, yes, I was the bad guy a lot.
I hated the way students fixated on grades and the way their intense anxiety about same interfered with their ability to learn. (In revisions, for example they would get focused on trying to give me what they thought I wanted--answering my feedback at the most literal level--instead of trying to understand the principle of argumentation (or whatever) that I was trying to teach them.) And I hated it especially because I was mostly teaching English to non-English majors; they didn't have any reason to be there BESIDE the grade, and that made it really hard on all of us.
(The other side of the coin is that I was just as utterly, miserably grade-obsessed as any of them, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student--it's very easy for overachievers (like me) to get obsessed with the external validation of a 4.0 and thus miss the point of education in the first place. But I still have anxiety dreams, four years after finishing my Ph.D. and almost ten years after the last course I took for a grade, about messing up my GPA. And the fact that I never did, that I maintained a 4.0 all the way through, is something that in retrospect I think would have been better honored in the breach.)
I don't know if any of this is helpful to you--I hope so.