How to speed grading #3: *When in doubt...*

In the first post of this series, I encouraged teachers to adapt an umpire's mindset when grading your students' work.  Don't think about why a student wrote what they did, don't think about what the student might have meant... just read with they did write, score it, and move on.

Next, I gave advice about how to prevent complaints on your test grading, by doing corrections before students see their original work.  Then there's no need to write comments that students won't read, anyway.

Even after taking these first two pieces of advice, teachers can still get stuck in the figurative mud while they wade through a stack of papers.  A rubric can't cover every possible answer, every possible approach to a problem.  In a stack of 50 problems, maybe 10 or 20 of them will cause you to pause and say, well... I dunno.  

Often times a student's answer lives in a quantum superposition state of earning or not earning a point.  If you're going to spend less than a three-hour-tour grading your tests, you simply must become comfortable resolving that wavefunction quickly and without regret. 

That's easy to say, difficult for a caring professional to do.  Try as we might, teachers live in the moment sometimes, too.  We want desperately for our students to do well on this particular test.  We want to be absolutely sure we've given every benefit of the doubt to a student response.  (We want to be prepared to defend ourselves against the inevitable lawyerly whine, too, but see the previous post about that.)  So we hem and haw.

Umpires and referees simply have no room for hemming.*  They must make a call in the moment.  So they train with "when in doubt" statements.

*Or hawing.

• When in doubt, it was an incomplete pass - not a catch-and-fumble.
• When in doubt, the runner is out at first on a bang-bang play.
• When in doubt, the player receiving the ball was NOT offside.
• When in doubt, the batter was in the box when she was hit with her own batted ball (so the ruling is "foul ball", not "out".)

These guidelines have been developed over years of veterans' experience.  They usually lead to a correct ruling.*  But that's not entirely the point!  These "when in doubt" statements also allow the game to go on with a minimum of fuss even if a parent's grainy video later shows that the referee got the call wrong by a centimeter.  We try not to disallow a goal or declare a turnover on a 50-50 call.  Instead, we make the expected call, the call that's not only more likely to be correct, but is least likely to turn the game in an unexpected direction.

* Professional trainers have published some experimental evidence on the second and third of these.  Yes, I read Referee magazine religiously.

Fans and players simply must get their heads around the idea that many situations in sports require split-second judgement by an official.  It's not good for the game for everyone to sit for ten minutes while the officials discuss amongst themselves, weighing arguments from opposing sets of players, then finally making a weak decision that only provokes further complaining.  No, it's best for the game for the official to make the best call they can, and get the ball in play again right away.

Two "when in doubt" statements I'd suggest that will help physics teachers make tight decisions:

• When in doubt, on a "derive" or "calculate" problem, if the final answer is right and some reasonable work is shown, award full credit.
• When in doubt, on a "justify" or "explain" question, doubt means do NOT award credit.

I mean, first and foremost, follow the rubric that the College Board or you have created for each problem.  Nevertheless.  When you're stuck, when you're not sure, use these guidelines and just move on.  The world won't end.  You'll end up with just as many (or as few!) arguments either way.  

In the end, an AP Physics test requires only 65-70% of the points to earn a 5, and 35-40% to "pass". It's not dignified to argue about the officiating.  Rather than complain about the one point that might have allowed them meet the passing threshold, perhaps the student should instead consider what happened on the other 60% of the points they crapped the bed on.