What Is a “1”? Grading, Interpretation, and the Ethics of Decision
The Teacher. AI image “I’ll give €1000 to anyone who can tell me what a ‘1’ is.” A colleague once made this remark during a teacher training seminar. The context was telling: more than twenty experienced teachers were asked to assess the same student essay using a shared rubric. Despite comparable professional backgrounds and clearly defined criteria, the results varied significantly. Some assigned the top mark, others a “3,” with several gradations in between. Such divergence is often treated as a practical inconvenience, something to be minimized through clearer guidelines or tighter standardization. Yet its persistence suggests a deeper issue. If a grade were a stable property of the text, one would expect far greater agreement. At the same time, few educators would accept that grading is simply arbitrary. This tension points to a more fundamental question: what kind of act is grading? The following argument proposes that marks are not discovered but produced through acts ...