Grading Papers

Over the last three weeks, I've been a TA in a college course designed for high schoolers. We had pretty much all seniors except for a couple sophomores. The students take a 100-level college course (for credit) over an intensive month. It's a lot. I didn't do any teaching of the content of the course, a kind of historical and politically scientific focus on "democracy," but I did teach and work with the students on writing an argumentative essay. This teaching on argumentative essays was what I did at the university I worked out, so I converted what I did over nine months into three weeks. Not easy! Additionally, these are high school students, no college students, so there's an extra obstacle there. Anyway, I don't want to focus on the pedagogical differences in secondary and post-secondary education; suffice it to say that the high schoolers were unsurprisingly not up to par. Deciding on the grading was difficult. For me, while I neither like nor particularly agree with the 4.0…