"I want to know," she said, "why I received this grade."

"Did you read the comments?" I asked. I had already shifted back onto my heels and protectively opened my gradebook.

"I don't know what this means," she said, and pointed to a particular comment on the back.

I read her the comment verbatim. "What you have to do," I said, "is break through the text to the subtext, to go a little deeper."

"But I did," she said, and she pointed to a paragraph on page 2.

"That's fine there," I said, "but you don't go far enough. The essay isn 't unified in any way." She sighed and looked up as the next class began to file
in.

"Why don't you read through my comments and think about them. If you still have a problem, we can schedule an appointment," I said, the model of fairness. "You can revise the paper as many times as you want, you know."

"Okay," she said, tucking the paper into her notebook.

As I walked out of class I thought of how often this conversation had occurred. Throughout the years, various students have come up after class and complained first about their grade and then questioned me as to how the grade was decided. This kind of haggling over grades had always been depressing. For most instructors, grading is not the point, and this kind of direct challenge over the bottom line made me, at least, feel like my priorities and student priorities were at odds.

But I also knew I wasn't being entirely fair. I had, after all, given her the grade, and she had shown some interest by coming up to talk about it. While I had easily defused her anger by "handling" her, by putting her off until later, I had not answered any of her questions at a time when her attention was focused on the paper. I had missed, in fact, a teachable moment. Most likely, she would not schedule a conference, and if she did, I would certainly be able to justify the grade. I had solved the immediate problem, but wasn't there some way her after-class talk indicated some deeper problem, a greater frustration with the way things were? And if that were so, was my reliance on time and inertia just more camouflage to keep the instructor student relationship in a balance of power that favored me?

Every instructor knows that grading is both less arbitrary than students believe but more arbitrary than the instructor would like. For instructors, a grade remains something that has to be defended should a student challenge that grade. From a student perspective, most grades are not challenged, primarily because such challenges lead to an adversarial situation between the instructor and the student, and most students, savvy to classroom dynamics, are unwilling to erode that goodwill for the sake of a single grade. Live and write for another day might be their motto. It is at this point that students sacrifice a great deal of the authority of authorship that we have tried to give them. In order to give up the idea of challenge, they have protected themselves by being forced to care less. But what if the idea of challenge could be built into the grading system, to give the students that opportunity, and by giving them the opportunity, continue the teaching process for both instructors and students?

Grading conferences are a way of empowering students that goes beyond simply explaining how they received the grade and moves towards giving them and the instructor insight into the writing process by creating an open dialogue.

There are a number of problems with giving students only written responses to their work:

a) Instructors are asserting their prerogative by the actual writing on students' papers, physically overwriting and therefore overriding the students' prose. Even those instructors who eschew pens for the muted blue or green markers write marginal and summary comments, as well as line-by-line comments. Physically, the instructor has the last word, thus denying the student ownership of the paper.

b) Most instructors grade student papers as a set. On the positive side, this allows the instructor to view the entire class which gives him or her an idea as to the range of views and abilities. A viewing of this range promotes an arbitrary fairness. On the negative side, a view of this range (which accounts for a great deal of the instructor's power) is always denied students except in the most limited sense of critiquing early drafts. When challenging a grade, a student really operates in the blind. If the student has friends in the class, he or she may have read one or two other papers to compare to his or
her own, but the student cannot possibly have the breadth of the instructor's reading of class generated texts. During a grade challenge, instructors often play this trump card. This appeal to hidden, secret knowledge is inherently unfair, since the students can never gain access to it, yet it is one of the main determinants of grading decisions.

c) When grading papers as a set, instructors often repeat themselves in the criticism of student papers. While it may be true that in a given assignment students might tend to make the same kinds of errors, it is more likely that it is the instructor who is projecting a gradually less fuzzy template of the "perfect" essay over each student essay and then correcting students when they do not measure up. I don't think the problem is the imaginary template. That seems to be an unavoidable construct of the human mind when one is faced with the double bind prospects of setting standards at the same time as rewarding individuality, of coaching and judging, of acting as reader and editor. The problem, I think, comes from the fact that students believe that the instructor has "held back" some important criteria, and that they are now being unfairly penalized for not divining that criteria.

What grading conferences attempt to do is bring the process of inquiry already incorporated into studios down to the nuts and bolts level of student papers. Rather than the instructor giving an "answer" in terms of a grade and comments, the paper becomes the point of departure for discussion. The students' writing strategies can be discussed and uncovered; often, I am surprised at the rhetorical calculation involved. What became immediately apparent when I began having grading conferences with students was how much of my own grading criteria was tacit and deeply held, never truly shared with students. Many times student papers which I felt had missed the boat had missed only the boat I had automatically assumed they would be on. Because I had never verbalized my own very basic assumptions, they had to create their own premises from hints and shrewd guesses, a subtle reading of the subtext of the assignment. What the grading conferences did was reopen the question of the assignment, foregrounding my premises and theirs. Grading conferences are not simply a method of grading out loud, of airing and therefore dismissing "beefs," but a method of discovery, of uncovering rhetorical premises and techniques on both sides, and arriving at understanding. What grading conferences do is provide a window into the undeniable complexity of composition, moving from the instructors' "common sense" criteria to an examination of the system of beliefs and rhetorical techniques that are being engaged. Grading conferences are not, finally, about grades, but use grades as an inquiry device.