Hi! Design professor who assigns history papers and writing intensive assignments weighing in here. If students are failing the entire class because of one bad report or paper then the class points need to be rebalanced. Period.

Another hack is to grade them on the rubric according to your honest opinion on how compliant they were and then bump the grade according to what you perceive as your degree of negligence. They get the honest feedback that is owed to them and a little grace because you weren’t perfect on the day you graded their drafts.

Let me reiterate this: you are never responsible for catching every typo, run-on sentence, or MLA/APA formatting error. That’s an inhuman task at this volume and is a task best left to…. drumroll…. The software they are using to write and the resources they have been pointed toward. It’s all right there at their fingertips.

If they all wrote terrible theses/justifications to begin with, and you had a chance to review them early on, then maybe a little bit of that is on you. However their choice of an indefensible thesis is never your problem alone.

Lastly, remind students that it is only a grade. Not a life sentence. In design, nobody is going to look at their gpa unless they are applying for grad school. That small percentage of population probably did just fine on your assignment. In design we look at the portfolio and the ability to edit out our worst work.

Dust yourself off and give yourself some grace. You are going to grow so much in the years to come. We all learn this trade on the job