Every now and then, in academic departments where I’ve worked, faculty members have exchanged graded papers and met to compare and contrast approaches to marking and grading student prose. There’s always an element of anxiety to this otherwise useful exercise: am I missing important points? injecting my own prejudices? failing to grade according to my own rubric? missing or overemphasizing mechanical errors? grading too harshly or not harshly enough? All credit, then, to Representative Mark Takano (Democrat of California, henceforth known as “the Teacher”) for making public his markup and grading of Representative Bill Cassidy’s (Republican of Louisiana, henceforth known as “the Student”) circulated letter opposing the U.S. Senate’s immigration bill.
Now, both the letter and the “grade” are political theater. Still, there’s an impressive amount of red ink between…