Gambling for Grading

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My chemistry teacher turned his classroom into a high stakes casino and played a game of Grading Roulette with us last week.

We had to write a lab report two weeks ago that supposedly counts for 15 per-cent of our second quarter grade - which is a significant sum of our year grade. But the ways by which he "graded" it were quite questionable.

In class last Wednesday we were given two lab reports to comment on and assign a numeric score out of 36 points. After this was done he told us that we had essentially assigned the other students grades for their lab report.

Which in my book is bad enough. There's no saying that we know what the hell we're doing, and there's a good chance that the quality of the lab report is not directly related to the grade given. Because of rampant favoritism - as well as the fact that different students can interpret the same rubric, objective and holistic as it is, differently - grades assigned could be very arbitrary in such a situation.

But it gets worse.

We were told that we could either accept the grade the students gave us or turn in the paper to our teacher, whereupon he would grade it.

If we turned the paper to the teacher, his grade would be final. So basically our final grade turns into a very crazy casino game.

I find this stupid - a grade should reflect your ability or inability to understand something, not how well you are liked by other students or how good your luck is in a game of Grading Roulette.

OK, rant over. You can now go back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

You need to report this to the school administration. His grading method was completely arbitrary and therefore unfair.

Your teacher sounds like a real ass.

I fail to understand why this is a "grading roulette". If you don't like the grade you were given by your peer (which is a valid way to grade) you can turn it in to the professor and he will give you a grade. Is this not what would have happened anyway? You turn it in and get a grade that cannot be changed?