Thoughts on grading

The quarter has already come to an end. The class I have been teaching this quarter needs me to put students final grades together. I found that, on their final projects, I tend to give them equally high scores. well, they are not exactly equal on a 10 pint scale. But if convert the grades into letter grades, my students pretty much all get an A or A- on their projects. I was told that I shouldn't do this. I should normalize their performance. But...this is a language class. It's not a right or wrong test either. I watch students perform and give a speech using vocabulary and structures they have learned throughout the quarter. Then I assign a grade to their performance.

There're so many factors that can affect the results of language learning. For example, motivations, age of exposure, and perhaps more psychological factors such as working memory, language aptitude, etc. It's really subjective for me to make judgment on their performance as a test evaluator. Of course objectively, I can tell which students have better pronunciation, more vocabulary, better grammar than others. But then the test should play a role in evaluating the effectiveness of my teaching. Some students are speakers of Cantonese, or have had schooling or exposure to Mandarin. If they correctly used a sentence pattern that's obviously beyond what's been covered throughout the course, should I give them better credit for that? What about students who have no prior exposure to Chinese before, but try hard to master the content that I have taught them-How should I recognize this part of their effort?

I want to encourage both types of students in terms of their work. But this is hard. Unlike English, if you teach in an EFL environment, you will have a class of students who share the same linguistic background, with similar exposure (more or less) to English. You won't have "heritage" English language learners in class. If you do, they will be superior on tests, and tests will be the only assessment tool.


Here in a Chinese as Foreign Language classroom setting, you have a mix of students with heritage, asian language speakers, and speakers of other languages. In a college setting, students level vary in class. Some students just couldn't read and write, but fluent in speaking. Althought sometimes they can be put under heritage track, some heritage learners with sufficient language skills might be placed in a class with other non-heritage learners, whether by accident or on purpose.

I do find this situation very troublesome.