I just wondered how others would handle this situation as PhD students.

I've recently shared the marking of some undergraduate essays with someone who is a member of staff (he is a new postdoc in the department). We were then asked to cross-check each other's marking by taking a sample of each other's marked essays. His marking was noticeably more generous than mine (mostly to the tune of giving marks that were 10 per cent higher than I thought they should have been, but occasionally 25 per cent, so putting students into the top grade that I thought were middling at best). I pointed out the bit of discrepancy I'd found, using a fairly gentle approach as I'm aware I'm the student and 'trainee' here. The upshot appears to be that he's not going to address this point but is going to overturn the few 'fail' marks I'd given to students, as he thinks they should be passes.

This feels wrong to me, but I'm not sure what if anything I can do about it as a PhD student. The person overseeing the course has no knowledge of the subject matter for this essay and won't interfere, and I'm conscious of being the one who is a student and who may come off looking worse if I try to take it any further. It just feels wrong as I think students are being given marks that don't reflect the quality of their work. To what extent would you assert yourself in this situation?

Found myself in this situation before and didn’t feel I could assert myself any further really. I just pretty much accepted that the full-time member of staff is the one with the power not a PhD student like me. I even found cases of plagiarism that the full-time staff didn’t want to hear about. I’m not sure what you can do to be honest. I was subsequently grading work for a different lecturer a few years later and they did take cases of plagiarism that I found seriously and so on. So not every lecturer will be the same, Chickpea. I guess my attitude was just ‘choose your battles’ and this is one I didn’t pursue as I didn’t feel I could as a grad student rather than a colleague.
Maybe someone else will have a different perspective.

That's a tricky situation. I'm currently doing some marking for a unit I didn't teach in because the tutor flaked on the unit coordinator last minute with 62 essays needing to be marked by Wednesday (final grades are due!). The tutor had a month, a MONTH to let the unit coordinator know that marking wasn't going to happen.
As I've been marking, I've been noticing that students they gave HDs (80s-100) to on their last two assignments are producing perhaps credit level work at best (60-69). And students I'm familiar with in other courses who do get good grades, have seem to have done poorly in this course. One student I've had in 3 other units, always an HD as they produce top quality work, and yet in this unit (which is still a sociology unit) can't even break a 60? Their paper I just marked is of HD quality, I reckon the others were as well. I'm wondering if some favouritism was at play.

Unfortunately, if the unit coordinator is not interested in ensuring fairness of grades (which is an issue) there isn't much you can do other than perhaps taking it up with the head of school, but that might be a bad step for your career. It also depends on how much experience you have, it takes a bit to learn what does and does not constitute particular grades, and there are also grading mark lines some faculties might have to follow (i.e. % HD, %D etc) as well as student evaluations. Sometimes, as PhD students we mark harder than we should because we're used to a high standard for our own work, but an undergrad isn't going to be able to meet those same requirements.

It might be better to let it slide (depending on how new you are) or, bring it up with head of school/the unit coordinator. Your call.

Thanks for your reply, JStanley. I pretty much thought the same as you - there doesn't seem to be any way of taking it forward from the position of the 'assistant'.

Thanks for your reply too, awsoci - I have been thinking about all the things you mentioned and I can't see anything I can do that would actually change the outcome - it would possibly just make me look like I don't know what I'm doing. Good luck with your marking - that sounds like a bit of a challenge.

Marking can be a nightmare. I was on the receiving end of getting on the wrong side of a lecturer in my MA and I'm certain they purposely marked me down. My UG I was getting good marks and all of a sudden it seemed I couldn't write for toffee according to the marks I was getting. On one occasion we did a piece of group work (not written by me) and the usual 80% student wrote it and we got about 54%, with me being in the group. The lecturer had even worked out the percentage grade wrong and we corrected her but she didn't correct it for us on the system so it stood. This unit was not second marked. I changed unis mid way through my part time MA and miraculously went from marginal pass to Distinction (my Distinctions were across different units with different tutors and were all second marked with agreeable percentages and my final piece was externally marked). I changed nothing of my writing style.

It's quite disheartening to see how subjective it all is and how grades can vary so much from one marker to another. I guess there are plenty of lecturers out there who are conscientious markers and really know their stuff, but it seems from the experiences described here that you can just as easily get someone who will look at your work for ten minutes and then mark it on a whim. Thank goodness you changed unis, wowzers.

There is definitely a level of subjectivity and unfortunately as we see on this forum it also spills over into the viva examination. People get various experts to read it and all is fine then another expert comes in at the end and makes you rewrite it. I did witness in a group grading session the lecturer (who the rest of us grad students were grading for) say at about 3pm "I'm tired now...whatever...50". So, yes, very much marking on a whim without even reading the thing. I think there is also an element of them taking care with grading the papers of students who they know will come and complain if they're not happy with the grade whereas it's easier to mark down a quiet student who won't say boo. It's true I am very disillusioned with academia at the moment but that disillusionment was steadily growing witnessing all these things over the years. All you can do, chickpea, is strive not to be like that. Just be you, conscientious etc. but I personally wouldn't challenge the tenured staff on anything. They can't be touched and the academic world is a small one.

I think the other issue as well is that the shift in Academia has led to increasing pressure to produce research and publish, whereas I think it used to be 80% teaching 20% research, it's now 100% research and an extra 40% teaching (lol). So we get the rise in the casualisation of academic teaching, where postgrads teach units, and academic staff not tenured are working their butts off to get as many publications in ERA rank A journals as they can just to be considered with little energy or time for teaching commitments.

Add the lack of setting limits on classes now (at least in Australia), where you could once only have x amount of students depending on your workload (you would set your enrolment cap), now the classes are not capped, meaning that your classes could go from a manageable 60 students to 250. That's a lot of marking, and without prior knowledge of enrolment numbers, getting funding for teaching assistants (and getting the right teaching assistants!) is also difficult.

I agree with the taking care, it unfortunately happens. If I have a problem student, I send their paper to be reviewed by a tenured academic staff member in the same subject area, if they agree with my grade, they make a note on the paper and it goes back to the student. Double-Marking, just because I don't want a student to harass me. I do mark conscientiously and provide a generous amount of feedback, but I don't have the time to mark up papers the way I would like. Students get a qualitative rubric with a chunk of comments at the end, but no mark up on the papers. With over 100 papers to mark and less than 2 weeks to do so to meet the turn around, there's just no time for proper marking that would show them how to improve.