March is the end of the academic year in Japan. It is the month when students graduate, receive their grades, and so on. Several weeks before these events happen, some professors evaluate theses or coursework I don’t have the right to evaluate theses, but I usually help students write theses as an informal cosupervisor.
Before becoming a faculty member, I didn’t understand how stressful it is to assess or help students work, especially knowing that it may affect their lives. This is not my first year doing lectures, and I’ve graded students before, but it’s still not something I got used to. It always hurts when I receive some complains about the grades from students or when I have to put a line between A and B, even though I am confident enough that I am doing things very objectively. I guess drawing a line is definitely something that I don’t feel comfortable doing. Back when I was a grad student, I scored a lot of assignments as a TA, but I didn’t feel bad doing it because it was the professor’s responsibility to give the final grade. Helping students with their thesis might sound like a totally different thing. Actually, it’s not that different. I can tell if a draft of a thesis has enough quality or not. Telling students that “this is not enough and you have to push yourself” (together with feeback explaining how to improve the thesis) is not something I like to say. It’s almost like saying that you are getting an F. The good thing is that this is not the final grade, and students usually have time and energy to improve the thesis. But I’ve also seen some students who couldn’t really push themselves.
An interesting thing is that I do not feel the same when I writing a review comment of a paper, which is another type of evaluation that I often do as a job. I think there are two reasons for this. First, we normally review papers written by someone you don’t know; if you know the authors, there’s a good chance that you are in a conflict of interest. This really lowers the psychological burden. Although the acceptance of a paper might drastically change a young researcher’s life, I usually don’t think about that when reviewing because it’s really hard to imagine who’s behind the paper. 1 Another reason why I don’t feel bad is because I know that it’s not only me who is assessing the others, but others will assess my work. So we are on a equal footing.
But my relationship with students is different. I usually remember students’ names by the end of the semester. This is because I’m in a relatively small department. And if some students are talkative or ask a lot of questions, I start to understand their character. If I’m helping someone with a thesis, they are usually a member of our group with whom I have spent two years.
Also, students do not have the power to evaluate me, so we are in an asymmetric relationship. Technically speaking, students can evaluate me by answering a questionnaire at the end of the semester. Only a very low percentage of the students answer this questionnaire, however.2 Even if the majority of the students answer it and I get a very bad score, I don’t think I’ll be in trouble. (But I’ll definitely be sad if I receive such an evaluation.)
In this kind of situation, I kind of feel like I’m a judge handing down a sentence to a friend or at least someone who I know quite well. As I already mentioned, I don’t like doing this. There seems to be no way to systematically solve this problem. The lecturer is the only one who can grade the students, and being friendly with students is my style that I’m not willing to change.
I know how to overcome this stress. It is to become a machine when grading students or helping someone’s thesis and not to be emotional when I do these jobs. Much the same way a surgeon regulates his/her emotions when doing surgery. I think it is a skill you acquire as you get used to the job as most of the senior professors do not seem to have this problem. If I know how to solve this problem, then why am I writing this blog post? Did I just want to rant? No. I thought my anxiety was something that I experienced as a junior professor, and I thought it was worth recording it. A decade later, I might become an absolute machine, and reading this post may help “humanize” me.