Theme Essay by Kelcey Parker
The Myth of Subjectivity
What’s not to hate about grading? It’s an awkward interpersonal exchange. When I hand back papers, I feel like a juror returning a guilty verdict. I avoid eye contact and rush students out the door.
Grading is time-consuming. If I’m going to assign a fair grade, I have to read the work closely enough to figure out what the student is trying to say, then craft a clear explanation of why they did not quite say it.
Grading is, admittedly, slippery. Two equally mediocre short stories may receive two different grades because one went from awful to mediocre, while the other went from mediocre to slightly less mediocre.
Most of all, grading has consequences. It impacts GPAs, scholarships, and job applications. Maybe that’s why creative writing instruction has a culture of, if not quite A-for-effort, A-for-playing-nicely. If you show up, slog through the steps of the writing process, have something chipper to say about your classmates’ writing, and turn in a final draft that’s different from the first draft, congratulations, you get an A.
Yet, we do our students and our profession a huge disservice when we don’t call it as we see it. And we do see it. We know when creative writing is engaging and sophisticated. Slippery though it is, grading creative writing is never merely subjective. Other forms of writing—from literary analysis to business writing—get tough grades. University composition courses dole out the toughest grades I’ve ever seen.
So why are we so soft on creative writing?
One reason is its often personal nature. Students believe they are expressing their deepest selves and bridle at the idea of one’s “self” being graded. Certainly, it’s no fun writing on a student’s paper, “I’m sorry to learn that your grandmother died, and I know it has affected you deeply. Unfortunately, you have not made it affect the reader. C+.”
Still, it needs to be said. Creative writing is not merely about personal feelings; it’s about communicating those feelings to someone who is not you.
Another reason we teachers shy away from tough grades is that we value the writing process. Teacher-writers today were weaned on Anne Lamott’s “shitty first drafts.” We play Peter Elbow’s “believing game.” We assign portfolios, champion the workshop, and celebrate progress. Grades have the bad rap of interfering with both process and progress, with deflating a student too early.
But we need to chart progress and to encourage further development. Old-fashioned as this may sound, grades are useful that way.
Consider the difference between “Your verses do not as yet have an individual style” and “Your verses do not as yet have an individual style: C.” For the student writer, the “C” might be just the punctuation mark that fully clarifies the sentence.
Perhaps the most problematic explanation for grade inflation is that creative writing—that mysterious art!—is somehow beyond mere grading.
But it isn’t. It never is.
Grading is what happens to a piece of writing when it is put before the eyes of others. It is read and ranked by editorial assistants, editors, readers, reviewers, judges, and committees. The grade may not come in the form of a letter, but there’s often a close equivalent.
When I was an editorial assistant at a literary journal, we were told to rank manuscripts on a scale of 1 to 5. Readers on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere rate books from 1 to 5 stars. Even book reviewers award up to five stars or moons or coffee cups. Entertainment Weekly brings us right back where we started with letter grades.
The grades and rankings must match a set of criteria. You would never see this in People magazine: “Her verses do not as yet have an individual style: A.”
Yet, this is what often happens in graduate programs: “Her verses may not have an individual style, but they probably will eventually, and she showed up and wrote critiques and talked in class, so we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
I received A’s in fiction workshops from the time I began my master’s program to the wrap-up of my Ph.D. coursework. Was I really that good from the beginning? Did I not improve at all?
One consequence of such an approach is that it diminishes the rigors of writing both as an art and an academic discipline. Creative writing is already marginalized as a hobbyist humanity, a “fun” class as opposed to a serious and literary one. Confirming such misconceptions serves nobody who cares about our profession.
Another consequence is that it may stunt the growth of developing writers. I wonder how much faster I might have improved had I, early on, been given a grade other than an A.
“Your verses do not as yet have an individual style.” This line comes from the first of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Responding to his correspondent’s request for feedback, Rilke goes on to say:
Yet they possess a quiet and hidden inclination to reveal something personal. I felt that very thing most notably in the last poem, “My Soul.” There, something of your inner self wants to rise to expression. And in the beautiful poem “To Leopardi” something akin to greatness and bordering on uniqueness is sprouting out toward fulfillment. However, the poems cannot yet stand on their own merit, are not yet independent.
Rilke does not give the young poet a letter grade. He provides a respectful and thoughtful assessment of the poems. But there is an implied grade, a set of criteria by which Rilke evaluates the verses and by which they will be evaluated by others someday: personal expression, greatness, uniqueness, independent merit.
If an honest grade is the punctuation mark, then a thoughtful assessment of a student’s work gives the grade meaning. As readers and teachers, we each bring different life experiences to any piece of work. Too often, however, students assume that “everything’s subjective,” implying that nothing should be judged.
The Rilke passage points up the connection between critical judgment and a highly personal response to another writer’s work. Engaging with the work, focusing on the writer’s intention and getting down in the muck with him or her, is what’s so inspiring. It’s personal but rigorous, too; it’s what tough love—and tough grading—is all about.
Additional Publishing Information:
- Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (W.W. Norton, New York, 1934).
Art Information
- “Failed,” “D Is for Damned,” and “Slight Improvement” © Hadley Langosy; used by permission
Kelcey Parker is the author of For Sale By Owner (Kore Press), winner of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award in Short Fiction. She teaches creative writing to undergraduate and graduate students at Indiana University South Bend.
Her novella, Liliane's Balcony, set at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2013. The opening chapter first appeared in Talking Writing as "Liliane's Balcony: A Novella of Fallingwater."
For more information, see Kelcey Parker's website.
