I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it y

I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it you could probably tell the teacher what grade it should receive. If you couldn't, if she gave you a great paper, (say an A paper) and you could easily compare the relative merits of each paper. You'd know immediately if your paper was worthy of an A or not. Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief. Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c." On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.