The existential stress of exams

In which I worry about the grades I'm giving my students

Photo by Bill Mackie on Unsplash

The questions nag me like wasps at a picnic on a hot day. Am I grading fairly? Am I being too harsh? Am I crushing some bright young person’s future by giving them a B+ instead of an A-, bringing their GPA down enough to stop them getting into the top-tier graduate programme of their dreams three years down the line? Or would giving them the A- actually give them an inflated sense of their own ability that could come back to bite them, instead of allowing them to build resilience?

These questions, and others, buzz in my brain as I check the distributions of grades at the end of two weeks of marking. Some of it was easy: the listening and reading exam, all multiple choice questions, right and wrong answers, black and white. The speaking and writing is where it gets fuzzy.

The speaking was all graded on the spot as students gave short presentations through the semester. With those, I worry about fairness. Am I grading to the same standards at the beginning of the day when I’m fresh as I am at the end of six hours of classes? At least when I look at the averages and distributions for each class, they look reasonably consistent, and that’s comforting. Apart from that one class, with all the boys from Guangdong, where I’ve given many more A grades. Many of the students in that class speak English at a higher level than the average freshman. They’ve had more opportunities. Some have spent time in the US or elsewhere. Perhaps their families are wealthier and they’ve attended international high schools and had more personal tuition. Students who are already good at English tend to get more from our classes than students who are weaker.

This touches on one thing that bothers me about teaching at this expensive international campus of this prestigious university. Students from wealthy families who already have had more opportunities in life are able to come here and get more opportunities, and so the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. I don’t think any of our students come from poor families, because the tuition fees here are much higher than a normal Chinese university, but there’s a kind of fractalness in society, and I worry that students who are relatively less wealthy are disadvantaged compared to the more wealthy. And so I wonder, if I give proportionally more A grades in one class than another, am I propagating social inequality? Is it more important to measure individuals against the same standard, or to reward their individual progress?

My least favourite, though, is grading the writing. We had our biomedical sciences students write academic encyclopaedia entries about topics they chose. They worked hard. They wrote interesting things, about leukaemia and epigenetics and HPV and heart disease and the biological clock. But I hated grading them, because there were so many who messed it up by ignoring instructions or feedback, or not proofreading carefully. Like the girl who submitted her final version with my paragraph of feedback on her draft still sitting there as part of her text. Or the guy who ignored the injunction against figures of speech in scientific writing to say that leukaemia “is like a demon that has haunted humans for years.” The simile is apt, but for an academic paper I have to sigh and tell him not to do that next time.

The goofs from poorly followed instructions are small potatoes compared to the headache of dealing with AI. Last year, ChatGPT was just emerging, but it and other AI tools are now widely used among our students. In our classes, we’ve been emphasising the importance of authenticity over grammatical accuracy. That hasn’t stopped some students from ChatGPT-ing scripts for their presentations or paragraphs for their papers. A fully ChatGPT-ed text is relatively easy to spot because of its blandness and formulaic structure. What’s harder to see is when they’ve actually written text in Chinese then used DeepL or a similar AI translator to convert it to English. Or when they’ve written it in English themselves, then used DeepL or ChatGPT to fix the grammar. In the past, a straightforward bit of plagiarism was usually obvious. A grammatically and stylistically sophisticated sentence or two would appear like an iceberg amid the sea of incorrect verb forms and misplaced articles. Now, I look at a perfectly polished paragraph and wonder whether it’s plagiarised, or whether it’s AI-assisted, or whether the student is just very good.

There was only one very egregious use of AI in the forty-eight papers I marked this time, though. One girl, writing about HPV, said that it had been originally discovered by two German scientists, “Friedrich Jünemann and Dr Schütte”. The paragraph in which she mentioned this had no citation, and out of curiosity I googled them. There was nothing in English-language search results. Nothing at all. But there was a Chinese-language website with those names. When I clicked through, I found it was an AI-generated “answers to science questions” page. My student had taken this AI-generated Chinese text, translated it directly to English and stuck it into her paper as fact. I don’t think Jünemann and Schütte even existed, because I’ve found nothing about them anywhere else. I hope I can have a conversation with that girl to make sure she understands why this was a problem..

We’re still navigating the rocky shoals of how students can use AI tools in an ethical way that will help rather hinder their learning. But even without that, there’s the question of do I go strictly by the rubric, or do I fluff things up a little to better reflect the effort they’ve put in? And in general, I’m a go-by-the-rubric, stick-to-the-marking-scheme kind of teacher. Probably because I come from a STEM background. In physics and maths, the answer is right or wrong, on the whole. But I’m learning that teaching language is different. There’s also something of a US/UK divide in our team. My English colleague and I tend to go more by the standardised marking scheme. For us, an A is something special, not to be given lightly. My American colleague wants to motivate students more by curving the scores for different classes. For him, an A is what shows that a student did the work that was expected for the class. There are strong arguments either way.

Either way, I wish the students’ achievements didn’t have to be flattened into a percentage or a letter grade at the end of the semester. That B+ doesn’t show how that one student livened up the classroom, how he chipped in with his opinion loudly and enthusiastically every time I asked questions. That C grade doesn’t show how smart and quick-witted that other student is, how quickly he grasps complex concepts. It just shows how scatterbrained he is in formal assessments.

In the midst of all this grading angst, a high point this week was a meeting with one of my sophomore students, “George”. George is a smart-ass loudmouth who always has something to say in class but does as little work and takes as many shortcuts as possible. He left me speechless earlier in the semester when, instead of having a conversation with one of the international students, which was their homework task, he recorded a conversation with an AI chatbot. When it came to the end of the semester, I gave him a temporary fail (that particular course is pass/fail), because he hadn’t completed all the homework. As I hoped, this prompted him to come and talk with me to discuss his situation.

When he arrived at my office, he was trembling with anxiety. I told him to relax. We were going to have a cup of coffee and a conversation, so that he could show me he could actually have a real conversation with a real person in English. Once he got over the nerves and realised I wasn’t going to scold him, he started to open up. I asked him how university was going. He talked about how he felt he had two faces: the confident, outgoing fun-loving image he cultivated in front of his peers, and the scared stressed person he was when alone. He talked about the shock of going from always being the smartest in his class in high school, to being just one of a whole class of equally smart people here. He talked about how he had hoped to get into Tsinghua University, top in the country for science, but didn’t make it because the year of his college entrance exam, the maths paper was incredibly difficult and Tsinghua didn’t adjust for that. He talked about the stress of competing with his classmates, and the loneliness of not having anyone to talk to about it. He had tears in his eyes.

We talked for almost an hour, and then I gave him a make-up task to complete to pass the course. He left relieved and I think grateful. I don’t know if it’ll make any difference to his attitude next semester. We’ll see. But amid the spreadsheets and soul-searching over 180-odd grades, it was nice to have that interaction that I hope was for the good of that one young man.

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