It doesn’t take much experience as a teacher handing back student work before one is confronted with a student’s protest after looking at feedback that “grading is subjective.”
The complaint is a common one but also worthy of examination because it helps us clarify both the most fair and effective way to evaluate student work and also the necessary and appropriate role of teacher judgment in evaluating student work.
Let’s start be analyzing what could be meant when a student complains that a teacher’s assessment of his or her work is “subjective.” In the most pejorative sense it could mean that a teacher’s judgment is capricious, unprincipled, or worse — an expression of the the teacher’s personal regard (or lack thereof) for the student. If that’s true of the teacher’s evaluation, then we all need to admit something seriously wrong is at play, and the vast apparatus of how schools evaluate student achievement is potentially irrational and biased.
But there’s another sense in which judgment may be “subjective,” and it’s the one that should earn our respect or at least equanimity. When we say a judgment is “subjective” the next question should be “subject to what?” As above, if it’s subject to no consistent, clear standards or perhaps based on personal regard, then the student’s complaint hits its mark. But what if the teacher’s “subjective” judgment is subject to his or her interpretation of the relationship between the student work and a clear, shared, accessible, even “objective” standard of excellence — what teachers like to call a “rubric.” This is still very much a “subjective” judgment involved on the part of the teacher, but this judgment differs ethically and epistemologically in important ways from the teacher who judges student work without the aid of an explicit and shared rubric.
To illustrate this difference let’s think about the job of a home plate umpire in a baseball game. The umpire’s job is to stand behind home plate and call balls and strikes. The criteria of what counts as a ball or strike is “objective” because it is based on a publicly accessible and known definition of the strike zone. Any ball that is thrown over the width of the plate and above the knees and below the armpits of the hitter counts as a strike. Any ball thrown outside this zone is a ball. So if the criteria of balls and strikes is defined against an “objective” standard, then what’s with all the baseball managers who run out of the dug outs fuming with disgust at the umpire’s calls? Well, it turns out that a shared, objective standard of a strike zone does not release the umpire from using one’s “subjective” judgment as to whether the thrown baseball actually counts as a ball or strike. In other words, the presence of an objective standard is still consistent with the need for “subjective” judgments about how a particular event or artifact — in this case, a thrown baseball — interacts with that objective standard. The old chestnut that no human being is infallible is undeniable, but boy is there a difference between an umpire that once in a while calls a strike a ball and one that never defines in a clear and consistent way the strike zone that the pitcher must aim for in the first place!
Back to school: The above example illustrates the distinction between two different complaints about “subjective” grading or assessment. The first is about “subjective” judgments without making clear to students the objective basis for the teacher’s judgments. Evaluation becomes a mystery to the student, and the student’s ability to improve more a matter of telepathy and luck. But there’s the other kind of teacher making “subjective” judgments against a clear, public, accessible standard of excellence. Of course, the teacher isn’t a robot nor is he or she infallible. Her judgments about where a student’s work may fall on the rubric is his or her judgment, but it is a judgment continuously honed by experience and the unpleasant but often beneficial effects of often having to defend it to colleagues, students, parents, and administrators. More importantly, the student can articulate his or her areas of growth and improvement because the teacher has made judgments against a rubric that can both explain previous achievement and provide a guide to future excellence. This is the importance of what we call "standards-based assessment.” It involves the prior dissemination and comprehension of rubrics, the assessment of student work in the explicit terms of the rubric, and the thoughtful application of the teacher’s judgment in guiding the student to continuous improvement against an “objective” standard of academic excellence. So yeah, the student is right that teacher judgment is always, only “subjective,” but it’s ultimately the difference between the umpire that sometimes misses a call, and the umpire who keeps changing up the strike zone for each pitch.
