It's been a high-judgment week, you guys. Last Friday I graded most of two batches of exams. On Saturday I went into the office and graded the grad students' projects. On Tuesday the search committee made decisions. On Wednesday I submitted the final round of admissions committee ratings, which was A Project. Today I graded another batch of exams at breakneck speed (let's hope the grading was consistent as well as lightning fast -- I had promised to return them today, and it's been a hectic week), and the admissions committee met all afternoon to plan its recommendations to the chair, and then I graded the online discussion I'd been avoiding all week. I am all done making judgments for a while.
Pretty soon I am going to go and curl up with the last chapter of When in French (I have some things to tell you about it; they will have to wait until my judger is restored), but I've been musing all week about the likability question. Jody left a comment which I'm going to paraphrase here-- I'm remembering it as saying that an emphasis on likability is a channel through which bias makes itself known. I can absolutely imagine how that could happen, but it wasn't the thing I was fretting about. I'm wondering how much an emphasis on likability penalizes people who are quirky, or reserved, or less confident.
It came up for me in both committees, curiosity about how much weight to give the feeling that an applicant was someone I'd like to invite for coffee. I almost never have coffee with my students; I seldom have coffee with my colleagues. Does it matter if I think I might want to? Can I really tell anything worth knowing from that feeling? I'm not sure. In the end I gave the feeling a little weight, but not very much. We'll see how it all shakes out, I suppose.
I think tomorrow will be the first Saturday of the semester in which I haven't needed to go to the office. I have some email I didn't get to this afternoon, but I can knock that out from home. I am BY GOLLY not grading anything this weekend. Whee!
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