I don't often hear the word joy applied to grading exams, but I'm sitting at my desk smiling from ear to ear after reading an essay scribbled in response to a question on the midterm exam I gave yesterday. I don't even care how hard I had to work to decipher the student's nearly illegible handwriting: he grabbed that question and nailed it--which made me immensely happy because I'd written that question with this particular student in mind.
I know, I know--exams are supposed to be objective measures of students' understanding, not invitations for a certain student to showboat, but this is an odd kind of exam: students are given seven topics but must write about only four of them, and for each topic they choose, they have to write about three literary works listed beneath the topic. The question in question (ha!) presents a topic and three works I suspected few students would care to tackle (and sure enough, very few did), but I've had this student in class before, and I knew that if he were a cat, this question would be catnip.
And of course he jumped on it with both feet and batted it into submission. Given the time constraints, his response was rich, insightful, and buzzing with energy. If every response were like that, midterm grading would be sheer delight instead of drudgery occasionally punctuated by small pleasures. To read an exam that evokes the word joy is highly unusual, but that's why I wrote the question the way I did: to entice a student to make grading great again, of only for a moment.
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