We students all did our research and wrote our papers. When we got them back, they were marked with minor spelling and grammar corrections, and a letter grade, and that was it.

We all complained. We’d been in honors classes in high school. We’d worked hard to qualify for college. We wanted to do well. Where was the feedback on ideas, scope of research, ways to improve?

It turned out that the English professors and subject-matter professors had each thought that the other group was going to address the substantive issues, so they’d confined their own evaluation to basic corrections. They went back and gave us in-depth evaluations.

If our papers had been graded by machine, we would probably have been up in arms.

I find that my students for the most part have high expectations of the faculty who teach them. Whereas there is probably some level of acceptance of cheating or plagiarism among their fellow students, I think my students would be shocked and offended if they thought I’d just feed their essays into a scantron instead of reading and responding to them myself.

You might be surprised. I spend a lot of time talking to students and asking them about what they think higher education should look like. Their answers are not (generally) different from mine. They desire knowledge. They want to be challenged. With only one or two exceptions over the years, they believe the best and truest education is in the classroom with a professor, and they want their professor to grade their assignments.

I started having this conversation with students when my institution moved away from its liberal arts mission. I couldn’t help it. I would attend the kill-liberal-arts meetings and would end up passionately arguing and passionately weeping. The meetings would end, and I would have five minutes to get into the classroom where students were curious about why I was so upset. So I told them. I have continued this conversation semester by semester, now with students who didn’t see me weeping my way into the classroom.

When I turned back a set of freshmen papers this semester, apologizing for the delay it took me to grade all 100 of them (two sections), a couple of students actually came up to me afterwards to thank me for the care I took in grading them and commenting on them. These two were not history majors and both, I believe, received Bs instead of the coveted As. And, OK, that is only 2 out of 100, but it gladdened my heart.

There certainly are plenty of students here who probably don’t care, but I am always pleased and heartened by those who do. Of course I am usually talking to (a) history majors and (b) students who are engaged in some form of social justice activism, so I do understand that my sample is not very good.

What concerns me is that the folks at Pearson think there is a market for this, and I think that is based on some research. It is the same market that they pitch all those textbooks with “instructor’s manuals” to, which are there to teach you how to teach your class. Which I find very problematic. But since they keep publishing them, I’m guessing someone is buying…