What Is a “1”? Grading, Interpretation, and the Ethics of Decision

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 “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 of interpretation within systems that structure judgment without fully determining it.

The Illusion of Fixed Meaning

In everyday practice, grades are often treated as if they possessed a stable identity. A “1” appears to designate a clearly identifiable level of performance, one that exists independently of the evaluator. Rubrics reinforce this impression by offering detailed descriptors—“very clear structure,” “effective argumentation,” “broad vocabulary.” These formulations seem to anchor judgment in objective criteria.

A brief look at the assessment grid used in many contexts makes the structure visible. Student performance is evaluated across several domains—task achievement, organization, range of language, and accuracy—each scored on a scale from 0 to 10. These scores are then combined into a total (out of 40), which is finally translated into a grade from 1 (highest) to 5 (fail). The system appears precise, even mathematical.

Yet this numerical framework rests on qualitative descriptors that are anything but self-interpreting. Terms such as “very clear,” “effective,” “adequate,” or “limited” do not function as fixed measures. They are comparative expressions whose application depends on judgment. What counts as “very clear” in one instance may appear merely “clear” in another. The rubric structures evaluation, but it does not eliminate interpretation.

This is precisely the point Jacques Derrida makes in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Systems of meaning, he argues, lack a fixed center that would secure their elements once and for all. “In the absence of a center or origin,” he writes, “everything became discourse.” The terms that organize evaluation do not escape this condition; they depend on it. The apparent stability of the grade conceals a more fluid underlying process.

Slippage in the Classroom

The seminar described above brings this fluidity into view. Faced with the same text and the same criteria, teachers nonetheless arrived at different conclusions. This variation is not simply the result of carelessness or insufficient expertise. It reflects what Bernard E. Harcourt calls “slippage” in systems of meaning.

Harcourt characterizes poststructuralist reasoning as an attention to those moments “when we impose meaning in a space that is no longer characterized by shared social agreement.” In grading, such moments arise whenever descriptors fail to yield a single, unambiguous application. How clear is “very clear”? How developed must an argument be to count as “effective”? These are not merely technical questions; they expose the limits of the rubric’s determinacy.

In practice, teachers do not remain suspended in uncertainty. They compare, weigh, and deliberate. Eventually, a mark is assigned. This transition—from hesitation to decision—is decisive. It is here that interpretation becomes stabilization. The difference between a “1” and a “3” is not simply an error to be corrected; it is the trace of how different individuals resolve the same indeterminacy.

Grades as Relational Values

The instability observed in grading can be further clarified through a Saussurean lens. In Ferdinand de Saussure’s account of language, signs do not possess intrinsic value; they acquire meaning through their differences from other signs within a system. Value is relational, not substantive.

Grades function in a similar way. A “1” is not a self-contained entity but a position within a structured field. It is what it is by differing from “2,” “3,” “4,” and “5.” This relational character becomes especially visible when we compare different classrooms. A performance that earns a “1” in one group might receive a lower mark in another, where expectations are higher or the distribution of performances differs. The system does not measure an absolute quantity; it distributes value within a comparative space.

The numerical scale gives the impression of precision, but it overlays a fundamentally differential process. What appears as a fixed result is the outcome of positioning a piece of work within a network of distinctions that are themselves subject to interpretation.

Grading as Decision

Once this dynamic is acknowledged, grading can no longer be understood as the simple recognition of a preexisting value. It is, rather, an act of decision. Derrida’s account of decentered structures suggests that no final ground exists to halt the play of interpretation. Harcourt extends this insight by emphasizing that every stabilization of meaning carries consequences.

To assign a grade is to close a field of possibilities. Other evaluations remain conceivable, yet one is selected and fixed. This closure is neither arbitrary nor fully determined. It is constrained by institutional norms, professional training, and shared expectations, but these constraints do not eliminate the necessity of judgment; they frame it.

In this sense, grading is not merely descriptive but constitutive. The mark does not simply reflect performance; it institutes its value within a given system. The rubric guides the process, but it cannot replace it. Teachers do not uncover the “correct” grade; they produce an outcome within a structured yet open space. The variability observed in practice is not merely a failure of standardization—it reveals the irreducible role of interpretation at the heart of evaluation.

The Ethical Dimension of Marking

Once grading is understood as decision, its ethical dimension comes into view. If no ultimate foundation guarantees the correctness of a mark, responsibility cannot be displaced onto the rubric or the system. Each act of evaluation participates in shaping a student’s trajectory—determining success or failure, influencing opportunities, and affecting self-perception.

Harcourt speaks of the “distributive cost” of imposing meaning. In the classroom, this cost is concrete. A difference of one or two points may alter outcomes in significant ways. The absence of a final ground does not make evaluation optional; it makes it consequential in a different sense. What disappears is not the need to judge, but the illusion that judgment rests on a secure foundation.

The question, then, is not how to eliminate all discrepancy. Complete convergence would require a level of determinacy that the system cannot provide. Instead, the task is to recognize the interpretive dimension of grading and to assume responsibility for the decisions it entails.

Conclusion

The colleague’s challenge—defining what a “1” is—cannot be resolved by pointing to a fixed essence. The variation observed among experienced teachers indicates that such an essence is not available. Rather than treating this as a defect to be fully overcome, it may be more productive to see it as a structural feature of evaluative practice.

Grading operates within a system that guides judgment without fully determining it. Marks emerge through acts of interpretation that stabilize meaning in the face of ambiguity. To acknowledge this is not to abandon standards, but to understand their limits. What disappears with the loss of a center is not evaluation, but the illusion that it rests on a final ground. To grade is not merely to measure performance; it is to intervene in a field where certainty cannot be secured and where each decision carries weight beyond itself.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, 278–294.

Harcourt, Bernard E. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Poststructuralism?’” Columbia Law School, 2007.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Riedlinger. Libraire Payot.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. With a new introduction by Roy Harris. Bloomsbury, 2013.