Ranking, Liking, and all that Jazz

Our discussion in class on grading opened my eyes to a few things. While reading the article I was interested in the whole idea of "liking" and how that may influence our grading and evaluating as teachers. When I think back to teachers I have had, on more than one occasion I can think of how discouraged I had been by seeing a letter grade on a piece of writing with no real explanation as to how the teacher had reached that judgment. I think more often than not we convince ourselves that we know what an "A" paper is versus a "B" and so on, that we forget that students are the people who really need to know what exactly those letters entail. The evaluation free zones could be helpful in a class I think especially when trying to help students at least grasp some confidence in their own writing. Although I would not say that we need to do away with ranking all together, I think when we do use ranking as teachers, it needs to be with great explanation and justification as well as trying to rank off of a variety of pieces of work rather than each individual assignment.