Done!

Yippie! Grades are in. Papers will soon be shuffled. And I will pray no one comes calling at my office door at the start of next semester with a complaint about not getting the A they are sure they deserved. It's possible. There are a couple of people I think might have a hard time coming to grips with a C despite having consistently done a semester worth of C work or with the full letter grade or more reduction as a result of having bombed the hell out of the end of the semester.

I think next time I'm going to have them put just ID numbers on the essays because I kept worrying that my impressions of them so far might influence my assessment of their end of the semester writing. I'm pretty consistent and reliable in things I measure, but years as a researcher make me nervous about non-blind ratings. I take some reassurance that in the end, the final grades are nicely skewed towards the high side (25% in the A range) and have a distribution that goes all the way down to an F or two.