Dear Professor, About My 79…
The student wanted 80. The lecturer wanted the email to end. Neither got what they wanted.
The student got 79, which was a problem because 79 is not 80.
Outside a university, this distinction rarely causes much distress. If a restaurant received 79 customers instead of 80, nobody would convene an appeals committee. If your doctor told you that you weighed 79 kilograms rather than 80, you might actually regard the missing kilogram as excellent news.
Universities take numbers more seriously. Here, one mark can separate grades, classifications, scholarships and occasionally two entirely different versions of a student’s future.
So the student emailed.
It was a polite email. Grade appeals usually are, and at times, unrealistically so. They tend to begin with warm wishes about the lecturer’s health before proceeding to question their professional judgement.
I hope this email finds you well.
It did, for approximately three seconds.
The student wanted to know whether the assignment could be reviewed. There was no accusation of unfairness or suggestion of incompetence. Just a perfectly reasonable question: could 79 perhaps be 80?
Every academic knows the question, along with its close relative: Is there anything I can do to get one more mark?
There is. You could have done slightly better on the assignment.
We generally don’t write that.
The Problem is That The Student is Right
It would be convenient if this were simply a story about an unreasonable student. Unfortunately, the student has a point.
If 80 produces a better outcome than 79, then the difference matters. It might affect a course grade, CGPA, scholarship, award or classification. We designed those consequences, attached them to numbers, gave the student 79 and are now surprised that the student has become interested in mathematics.
Imagine being told during your performance review that your annual performance score was 79, but 80 would qualify you for promotion. There would be questions and probably a meeting. Somebody would locate the HR policy, somebody else would discover that the policy can be interpreted in two ways, and a senior academic who has spent years explaining to students that grades are not everything would suddenly develop very strong views about the methodological robustness of the performance evaluation system.
By lunchtime, the phrase procedural fairness would have appeared.
Academics are remarkably philosophical about numbers until the numbers are ours.
So the lecturer does the responsible thing and reads the assignment again. The argument is strong, the evidence is good and the analysis demonstrates insight, although it could perhaps have been more critical in places.
The rubric is consulted. It says that 70–79 represents “very good” work while 80 and above requires something resembling “outstanding” work. Asking what distinguishes the latter from the former, however, is frowned upon.
Civilisations have collapsed over easier questions.
Still, after careful consideration, the mark remains 79.
The Magnificant Precision of 79
There is something wonderfully confident about a mark like 79.
Not 78–81, not “roughly 80”, and certainly not “this is very good work and another competent academic might reasonably place it a few marks either way”.
Just 79, arriving with the authority of a blood test.
Assessment research is rather less confident. Sadler (2009) has shown why preset criteria cannot completely capture the complexity involved in judging academic work, while Bloxham et al. (2016) found that experienced assessors differ in what they notice, how they interpret criteria and how they ultimately make judgements.
Their article is titled Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking, which is academic language for things having become awkward.
Two competent lecturers can therefore read the same essay and agree on almost everything about its quality while one awards 78 and the other 81. This is not necessarily evidence that one of them should be removed from teaching. It is evidence that essays are not blood glucose.
Nevertheless, one of those numbers must eventually be entered into the system, and once it is, something remarkable happens: professional judgement becomes data.
79.
If the system permits decimal places, even better: 79.00.
Nothing conveys epistemological certainty quite like the two zeroes added by software.
We May Have Brought This Upon Ourselves
Universities are extremely fond of numbers, which is understandable because many of the things universities actually care about are annoyingly difficult to measure.
Has this student become a better thinker? Difficult. Has this research changed how people understand something important? Complicated. Is this person a good teacher? Depends whom you ask.
How many papers did they publish?
Seven.
Excellent. Put that in Excel.
Academics sometimes speak as though managerialism was imposed upon us by a mysterious species of administrator that appeared on campuses sometime around the invention of PowerPoint. This is slightly unfair to the administrators because we participate enthusiastically.
We know our citation counts and our h-index. We know which journals are Q1 and which journals are technically Q1 but somehow not the right kind of Q1. We know exactly how many publications are required for promotion while maintaining that research quality cannot possibly be reduced to publication counts.
Ask an academic their h-index and there is reasonable chance they know it. Ask them what an h-index actually measures and the conversation may become more nuanced.
The same applies to rankings. Academics routinely complain that university rankings oversimplify institutional quality, reward questionable proxies and create perverse incentives.
Then our university moves up 37 places, and now the methodology appears considerably more robust.
Universities publish celebratory graphics, senior management sends an email and someone writes Top 2% Globally in a font size normally reserved for natural disasters.
Curiously, nobody chooses that moment to reply, “Actually, rankings are a crude reduction of multidimensional institutional performance.”
There is a time and place for methodological objections.
Apparently this is not it.
Students Have Been Paying Attention
Donald Campbell (1976) warned decades ago that when quantitative indicators become important for decision-making, people start changing their behaviour to optimise the indicator. Goodhart’s Law makes essentially the same point.
Academics know these ideas. Some of us teach them.
Students appear to have understood the lecture.
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We tell them that education is about curiosity, intellectual growth and learning to think independently, and then we publish a grading table.
They read the table.
This is disappointing.
A student who asks, “What do I need to understand to become better at this subject?” is demonstrating precisely the intellectual curiosity we claim to value, while a student who asks, “What do I need to get an A?” is being transactional.
Meanwhile, an academic asking, “What research questions genuinely matter?” is pursuing scholarship, while an academic asking, “How many Q1 papers do I need for promotion?” is preparing their annual performance plan.
These are apparently completely different things.
Why Not Just Give the Student 80?
There is, of course, a simple solution: give the student one more mark.
Everyone is happy. The student gets 80, the lecturer gets their afternoon back, the university avoids an appeal and somewhere student satisfaction may rise by 0.0003%.
Unfortunately, there’s another student.
That student who got 78.
The 78 student now has an interesting argument. IF 79 is effectively 80 because one mark is too small a difference to matter, then surely the difference between 78 and 79 is equally trivial. Give them 79. (True story: a student had once appealed for a bump from 78 to 79, arguing that this would then compel the university to then bump them to 80. I signed and stamped the form with one word — no.”)
Unfortunately, we have already established that 79 is basically 80.
Congratulations. We have invented quantitative easing for grades.
The 77 student will be in touch shortly.
So we need boundaries. We could make the grade bands broader, although students would simply gather at the new boundaries. We could introduce more moderation, meaning another academic reviews the first academic’s judgement and produces a second professional judgement, after which both academics meet to produce an agreed professional judgement.
This is considered more objective because there are now two subjective people.
Alternatively, we could make the rubric more detailed, which is the traditional university solution.
When reality is messy, add columns.
Eventually, the rubric can specify every conceivable characteristic of excellent work, at which point students will optimise their assignments against the rubric and academics will complain that students are writing to the rubric. A committee can then be established to review the rubric, and the committee will recommend a revised rubric.
The revised rubric will contain more columns.
Higher education has survived for centuries using this basic technology.
The Student Has Learned the Lesson
Perhaps students are too obsessed with grades, but if so, they have excellent role models.
The researcher wants another citation, the academic wants another publication, the department wants another percentage point on student satisfaction, the faculty wants another hundred students, the university wants another place in the rankings, and the student wants another mark.
Only the last one is routinely diagnosed as an unhealthy obsession with numbers.
There is something almost touching about academics telling students that learning should be pursued for its intrinsic value while checking Google Scholar to see whether anyone has cited the paper they published on intrinsic motivation.
We are all romantics until the performance review.
The student has therefore not rejected the values of the modern university. The student has mastered them. They have identified the metric, understood the incentive structure and optimised accordingly.
In another context, we might call this employability.
Everyone in the university is watching a number: the Vice Chancellor has the rankings, the Dean has the KPIs, the academic has the performance review and the student has 79.
Everyone would like one more point.
Still 79
So the lecturer reads the assignment one final time. The argument is good, the evidence is strong and the analysis thoughtful — although it could have gone slightly further. The rubric remains unhelpful in precisely the way that very detailed rubrics sometimes manage to be.
The lecturer exercises professional judgement.
79.
The student remains disappointed, and this is where the story becomes irritating because everyone is behaving reasonably. The student is right to care about a mark with real consequences, the lecturer is right not to award marks simply because the next number is nicer, and the university is right that boundaries must exist somewhere.
Nobody has cheated, behaved badly or broken the system. Everyone has followed it perfectly, and somehow a grown adult with a doctorate has spent part of the afternoon deciding whether another grown adult’s use of evidence was worth 79 or 80.
Unfortunately, this is also where people like me enter the story. (For context, I’m also the Dean of a Business faculty.)
Eventually, some version of the email works its way upwards. The lecturer has reviewed the mark, the programme has checked the process and the regulations have been consulted. By the time it reaches my desk, 79 has acquired attachments.
So what do we actually do?
We could start by being more honest about what marks are. A mark on an essay is not a laboratory measurement; it is a professional judgement expressed numerically. That judgement should be rigorous evidence-based and defensible, but pretending that 79 possesses a scientific precision fundamentally different from 80 creates expectations the assessment process cannot always support. Sadler (2009) and Bloxham et al., (2016) give us good reasons to be considerably more modest about that precision.
Universities could also pay more attention to boundaries rather than individual marks. Where a single mark produces a disproportionately large consequence, work sitting immediately around that boundary could receive additional scrutiny as part of the normal assessment process — not because 79 should automatically become 80, but because consequential decisions deserve stronger assurance. Moderation then becomes less about checking everything equally and more about checking most carefully where our numbers matter most.
Appeals, meanwhile, should distinguish between “I disagree with the academic judgement” and “there may have been a problem with how the judgement was reached”. The former cannot sensibly trigger endless re-marking, unless every assessment is to remain provisional until the student encounters a marker who agrees with them. The latter absolutely deserves investigation: arithmetic errors, overlookeid material, inconsistent application of criteria or failures of process are legitimate concerns.
Most importantly, we should stop pretending that students’ fixation on marks emerged spontaneously. If we attach scholarships, progression, awards and employment signals to numbers, students will care about numbers. Telling them to focus on learning instead is rather like constructing a casino and putting up posters encouraging visitors to enjoy the shrimp buffet.
We can, however, make the numbers less mysterious. Better feedback, clearer exemplars, conversations about standards and assessment designs that reward judgement rather than point-collecting can shift at least some attention back towards what students actually learned.
None of this will eliminate arguments over marks because there will always be a boundary somewhere, and there will always be somebody immediately below it.
The aim then, should not be to build a system in which nobody ever questions a 79. A university in which students never question their marks would present problems of its own. It should be to build one in which the lecturer can assuredly explain why it is 79, the student can challenge the process when there is a legitimate reason to do so, and the institution can distinguish between the two without resorting to seventeen emails, three committees and the personal intervention of the Dean.
That seems achievable.
Although I would settle for fewer attachments.
References (if you’re interested)
Bloxham, S., den-Outer, B., Hudson, J., & Price, M. (2016). Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: Exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(3), 466–481.
Campbell, D. T. (1976). Assessing the impact of planned social change. Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College.
Sadler, D. R. (2009). Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(2), 159–179.
