Love's Labour's Lost - A Grading Story

Usually grades work in my favor, really. I'm a good student. I like learning. Teachers like me. I happen to test pretty well. Teachers give me good grades. We're all happy.

But there is one other time.

The spring of my junior year of college, I took 4 math and physics courses, 14 of my total credit hours. So, I took an acting class to balance out the semester. It was 5 credit hours because we met everyday to practice (i.e. distract me from my mental tension and give me a creative outlet), and it was considered one of my physical education courses. Score.

The course started well. We did some acting exercises which involved getting into all sorts of characters, we did some reading from an acting theory book and started to develop our raw talents. Then, the professor started periodically not showing up for class or just being extremely late rather frequently. I think she had something going on in her personal life, but in my college mind, this was an extreme breach of an unwritten academic contract, and I lost great amounts of respect for her.

We didn't do much for the rest of the semester, which culminated in a final project of participating in a play.  We all tried out for the university's spring productions, and if we were not cast in one of those roles, we were supposed to break into groups and act in a one-act play in front of the class. I was cast as Sir Nathaniel, the curate in the university's production of Love's Labour's Lost, a little-known Shakespeare comedy. If you're wondering about the casting choice, I shall inform your pondering mind. Yes, that is a male role. The special-guest director was trying to do that cool, modern cross-gender casting of Shakespeare plays. And I was playing a two-bit role of comic relief as a stupid yes-man with about 10 lines.

In Shakespearian style, there was a part in the play that was a play within a play in which Sir Nathaniel is playing Alexander the Great, so I spent a good portion of the play in a thin, belted silk shirt and tights, looking more like a Russian male figure skater than I'd ever like to admit to.

And the director wrote a special song to end the play. In which he had me sing a soprano solo. Now, I have spent a good portion of my life singing in choirs, so I can carry a tune, but if you have paid attention to my speaking voice, you have probably ascertained that I am solidly an alto. I basically sing tenor. Oh, and I sing in groups, not solo.

So, let's recap. This means that for two weeks, every night I stood in front of an audience, playing a male, in an embarrassing and revealing costume, and squeaking a solo at the end.

And then I went back to my room, put on sweatpants and hid from the world (and did math and physics homework) until the next night when I repeated the experience.

I have never been so publicly humiliated in my life.

And, finally, the coup d'état. The professor. Who had the gall to not show up to many of her own classes. Gave me a B for the class. Did I get a B in any of those math of physics courses? Nope. All A's. In fact, up until that point, I had a 4.0 average. But for the 5 hour acting class? B. When I asked why, she said that my performance in the play was uninspiring.

I have reviewed this scenario multiple times to see where I went wrong. Yes, I am sure my 10 lines containing no character development were uninspiring. I do hope they were somewhat funny. I am sure my attempt at a soprano squeak didn't leave her humming as she left the auditorium. But was there much that I could do better, given the situation? Was there something I did that was offensive so that the grading was retaliation? Maybe my attitude toward her class showed through, but really? Really?!

So, in the jargon of the chapter. I think both the validity and the reliability of the grading went wrong.

In this case, I hardly got a chance to act, so forming an entire semester's grade on my few lines and standing in the background on stage is like grading a student for the semester on their completion of one exercise. There's a whole lot to gain and loose in those few moments, and when the depth of the character the student is acting is minimal, can one grade them for character development? Which makes this assessment invalid.

And I am pretty sure that interpersonal or life circumstances got in the way of her grading decisions so that the grade I made on the day she submitted scores would not be consistent with the grade on other days and situations, making the scoring unreliable.

And all of this, made me really, really irritated. And I felt helpless and poorly-represented. And mad. To this day, I get mad about this. In fact, when I told my husband that we were supposed to reflect on a time in our lives when grading went wrong, he said, "oh no."

So, dear semi-anonymous internet counseling system, here is my story. Told one more time so that perhaps tomorrow I will get slightly less mad and learn from it.