I had a hard time with sloppy papers from students I like and well-written papers from students I don’t like. Along with that, I struggled with students who are in class and participate but haven’t turned anything in so their grade is terrible—I had to fight the desire to give them a grade they didn’t deserve because they are helpful in class or because they are among the smarter students in class. While I was writing my tip write-up I toyed with the idea of trying a blind grading system. Maybe for the final lit review I’ll take the papers from one of my classes, take their names off of them, and try grading them that way. It will be cumbersome to organize them so I can connect the papers with the names again when I’m done, but I think it will be a very different grading experience and I’m curious to see how it goes. In grading the midterm, I learned that I should not decide on a grade for any students until I have read through all of the papers. I tend to get too excited about small successes in the early papers and too critical of small errors when I get to the end of the stack. For the final, I’d like to read through, mark them, make a note to myself about what sort of score a paper might receive, and then after I’ve read them all I’ll go back through and decide on a grade. Hopefully that will even out the difference between papers I read at the top of the stack and papers I read at the bottom of the stack.