I'm a grad student in English Lit, which means I teach freshmen comp to undergrads, which in turn means they want to fight about grades at the end of each semester. One former student, who'd read this essay before I posted it (http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2...) asked how often students actually win grade fights, and I relied, "Never, with me."
I preface grade fights by saying, "I won't change your grade" and then talk about the paper to the extent necessary. The right way to get better grades is to do better work next time. Being on this side of the desk has definitely made me more skeptical of the students who said, "So and so was a hard grader / mean / hated me," mostly because those things might be somewhat true but can almost always be overcome by greater effort, at least at the undergrad level.
Also, grade fights can sometimes be won through silence, as James Fallows describes: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/03/-quot-... . His post is titled, "When you're done talking, stop," which might be slightly better advice than "rarely talk." Since learning the silence trick, grade fights have plummeted in length, since now I've learned to just sit there and give one sentence answers once the substance of an issue has been covered.
I preface grade fights by saying, "I won't change your grade" and then talk about the paper to the extent necessary. The right way to get better grades is to do better work next time. Being on this side of the desk has definitely made me more skeptical of the students who said, "So and so was a hard grader / mean / hated me," mostly because those things might be somewhat true but can almost always be overcome by greater effort, at least at the undergrad level.
Also, grade fights can sometimes be won through silence, as James Fallows describes: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/03/-quot-... . His post is titled, "When you're done talking, stop," which might be slightly better advice than "rarely talk." Since learning the silence trick, grade fights have plummeted in length, since now I've learned to just sit there and give one sentence answers once the substance of an issue has been covered.