The First Time I Heard Professors Laughing at Students’ Final Exams, I Said Nothing
My first year grading final exams at Rutgers, I was excited. Like, genuinely excited. LOL.
If you have never been part of university-wide final exam grading, it is an experience. Depending on the course, there could be 13, 15, maybe 20 different sections taking the same final exam. You do not necessarily grade your own students. Professors are assigned sections of the exam to grade, we develop and calibrate the scoring rubric together, and after you finish your assigned set, another professor may double-grade the work to make sure scoring is consistent.
Rutgers would have these grading rooms set up for a few days. They fed us lunch. There were drinks, non-alcoholic, y'all. LOL. You had professors coming in and out, stacks of exams everywhere, and people you may have worked in the same department with but never actually met. Depending on who you were, you might knock out all of your grading in one day or spread it across the three days.
My first year, I was looking forward to the whole thing. I wanted to see how the students did. I wanted to meet other professors. I wanted to sit around, grade, dilly dally a little bit, and experience this part of being a university professor that was new to me.
Child, did that disappoint me.
As people started grading, I started hearing the commentary.
“This is so stupid.”
“How could they make this mistake?”
“I kept telling them this.”
“This doesn't make any sense.”
There was this one professor I locked in on because he would constantly hold up exams to different professors. “Look at what they wrote.”
And they would laugh. Some would shake their heads. But I didn’t really hear anyone lean in with curiosity.
I remember sitting there getting hotter and hotter inside my body.
The entire environment felt stifling to me because there was so little empathy in the conversation about the students. We were holding the evidence of students' thinking in our hands, and instead of always being curious about what that thinking told us, some of the conversation reduced students to their mistakes.
And I hated it.
But there was something else happening inside of me that I probably did not have the language for at the time. I am Caribbean, and so much of how I was raised was rooted in this idea that the community has a responsibility for children. The adults around you were supposed to protect you, guide you, correct you, discipline you when necessary, and help lead you in the right direction. Everybody did not have to be your parent to understand that they had some responsibility for how children were treated in their presence.
So part of what confused me in that grading room was the room itself. Why are we not collectively mad about this? Why am I sitting here getting hot while everybody else is just grading? Why isn't somebody saying, “Yo, chill. Don't talk about these kids like that”?
I kept waiting for the community to correct itself. I did not expect every professor to have the same philosophy about education that I had, but I think I expected somebody else to say something. Somebody else had to be hearing what I was hearing. Somebody else had to feel uncomfortable. Somebody else had to wonder why we were laughing at students instead of being curious about what their mistakes were telling us.
And nobody did.
That was foreign territory for me.
There was another layer that I was beginning to notice too. Many of the professors I encountered had never taught in public K–12 education. Their experiences with teaching and learning were different from mine. They knew the students who arrived in their college classrooms, but they did not necessarily know everything that had happened instructionally before those students got there. Some had a deeply theoretical understanding of mathematics, but they had not necessarily spent years inside public school classrooms watching how students develop mathematical understanding over time.
I had.
So while someone else might have looked at an incorrect answer and thought, “How could they possibly write this?” my brain went somewhere else. I wanted to know why they wrote it. What did they understand? Where did the reasoning break down? Was this a procedural mistake? Was there a conceptual misunderstanding underneath it? What had they been taught before they got to us?
But here's the part of the story I am not necessarily proud of.
I didn't say any of that.
I left the room.
I was new. I was young. I was still learning the lay of the land. These were professors I did not know, and this was an institution where I wanted to continue working. I remember being angry about what I was hearing but also very aware that I had a job, an income, and professional relationships that I did not want to jeopardize. And if I am being truthful, I also did not want to be the only person saying something.
That bothered me almost as much as the comments themselves. I wanted someone else to go first. I wanted another person to confirm that what I was hearing was not okay. I wanted to know I was not about to make myself the problem in a room where nobody else seemed to have a problem.
So I walked away.
And that bothered me.
It especially bothered me because this was not the first time I had heard an educator talking about students in a way that did not sit right with me. Years earlier, when I was teaching high school math, I remember sitting near a group of educators during lunch duty when someone started talking about students and how they were acting. I could tell she wanted me to join in and agree with her.
I didn't.
I told her about herself. Respectfully. Well, respectfully with a sprinkle of disrespect. LOL.
My point was simple: don't talk about these kids like that.
Even if there was truth somewhere inside what she was saying about their behavior, I could not understand why we needed to talk about children that way. They were still somebody's children. They were still developing. They were still deserving of dignity even when they were getting on our last nerve.
But years later, in that Rutgers grading room, I couldn't find that same voice.
That realization did something to me.
I had always thought about freedom as having control over my time, being able to choose what I worked on, and eventually creating a life where I had more ownership over what I did. But I started realizing there was another kind of freedom I wanted.
I wanted the freedom to say what I believed.
And at that point in my career, I didn't completely have it. Or maybe more accurately, I hadn't yet developed the courage to use it when there was something I thought I could lose.
The following year, I walked back into that grading room.
And there he was. The same professor, with a new haircut but the same kind of commentary.
Except this time, I had already spent a year thinking about everything I had not said. So when it started again, I said something.
Actually, I went off, respectfully. But I said what I had to say, and I said it loud enough for the room to hear.
I challenged the way he was talking about the students. I asked whether he understood what was happening on the public education side before these students arrived in our classrooms. We went back and forth. Other professors joined the conversation. Some understood exactly what I was saying. Others agreed with him.
And you know what? I really didn't care. Because the most important thing that happened in that room was not that everybody agreed with me.
The room became aware.
Nobody could continue the conversation pretending there wasn't another way to think about those exams. Maybe someone reflected right then. Maybe somebody thought about it on the drive home. Maybe somebody went home and told their spouse about this professor who got on their nerves in the grading room. LOL. I don't know.
But the perspective was in the room now. And I was proud of myself for putting it there.
Now here’s the mirror. 🪞 What we say about students when they are not in the room matters just as much as what we say to them when they are sitting in front of us. Sometimes our deepest beliefs about students are not revealed during the lesson, the observation, or the professional development. They show up afterward, when we are looking at student work with colleagues and think nobody is listening.
An incorrect answer is information. A ridiculous-looking mistake is information. A student choosing a method we would never choose is information. And this is where subject matter expertise matters. Knowing mathematics deeply should allow us to do more than recognize that an answer is wrong. We should be able to look at the work and ask: What does this student understand? Where did the reasoning break down? Is there a conceptual misunderstanding underneath the procedure? Is there something mathematically valid in their thinking that they do not yet know how to communicate?
That is part of what expertise gives us. It gives us more ways to interpret what we see. When we understand the mathematics deeply, a wrong answer does not have to be the end of our analysis. It can be the beginning of an investigation into student thinking. Our expertise should make us more curious, not more comfortable judging students for what they do not know yet.
But I also think there is a question for the community around that educator. What happens when somebody in the room starts talking about students in a way that strips away their dignity? Do we laugh along? Do we stay quiet because we do not want things to get awkward? Do we look around hoping somebody with more authority will say something? Do we leave the room like I did that first year?
Or does somebody say, “Nah. We’re not doing that.”
I think about this differently because of how I was raised. Community responsibility does not mean excusing students from accountability. Quite the opposite. The adults around me believed deeply in correction and discipline. But there is a difference between correcting a child because you believe they can do better and talking about a child as though their mistake tells you everything you need to know about them. One comes from responsibility. The other can very quickly become contempt.
And I don't think empathy for students should depend on whether the most courageous person in the room happens to speak up that day. The culture of a school, department, grading room, or mathematics team is built collectively. What we challenge becomes part of that culture. What we laugh at becomes part of it too. And what we repeatedly allow to pass without comment eventually tells everybody in the room what is acceptable.
There is also a larger conversation here about the spaces between K–12 mathematics and higher education. We can spend a lot of time talking about whether students are “prepared” for college mathematics without enough conversation between the people who teach students before they arrive and the people who receive them once they get there. Both groups know things the other group needs to hear. When those perspectives never meet, students can become the easiest people to blame for the gaps between our systems.
Subject matter expertise matters here too because knowing mathematics and knowing how students come to understand mathematics are connected, but they are not interchangeable. We can know an enormous amount of mathematics and still have more to learn about how a student arrived at an incorrect answer, what experiences shaped their understanding, or what instruction might help them move forward. Expertise should give us confidence in what we know without convincing us that there is nothing left for us to be curious about.
But there is another mirror in this story for me personally.
Sometimes we know something is wrong and still don't say anything. Maybe it is a grading room. Maybe it is a faculty meeting. Maybe it is an administrative meeting. Maybe somebody says something about a student, an educator, or a family that makes your entire body hot, and you sit there calculating what speaking up might cost you.
Your job. Your reputation. Your relationship with your supervisor. Your next opportunity. Your peace.
I understand that calculation because I have made it.
I also don't think courage means pretending those consequences aren't real. There are people working inside systems where speaking up can absolutely affect their livelihood and professional security. I am not interested in judging somebody for surviving the environment they are in. But I do think we have to notice what repeated silence does to us.
That first year, I left the grading room because I could not sit there and listen anymore. The next year, I stayed and made the room listen to me.
I didn't become fearless between those two moments. I had simply reached the point where remaining silent felt worse than the possibility of being uncomfortable.
And maybe that is part of how our professional voice develops. We don’t always walk into our careers knowing exactly when to speak, how hard to push, or what we are willing to risk. Sometimes we find our voice after leaving a room wishing we had used it.
I certainly did.
Years later, when I think about freedom and the work I have built for myself, I realize that part of what I was searching for was the ability to live and work in alignment with what I actually believed. Building my own business gave me more ownership over my time and my work, yes, but somewhere along the way I was also building the confidence to stop shrinking my voice simply because someone else had more seniority, a different title, or a seat inside an institution I respected.
That grading room taught me something about student thinking. It taught me something about the gap between K–12 and higher education. It taught me something about community and the responsibility we have for students even when they are not physically in the room. And it taught me that subject matter expertise carries a responsibility with it. What we know should help us see more in student thinking, not see less of the student because their thinking is incomplete.
But mostly, that grading room taught me something about myself.
The first year, I got hot and walked out.
The next year, I got hot and spoke up.
Sometimes finding your voice begins with remembering all the times you left a room wishing you had said something.
DOPE MATH® in Practice
An answer being different from the one we expected does not automatically make it mathematically wrong.
Sometimes students use a strategy we did not anticipate. Sometimes they represent their thinking differently. Sometimes their reasoning is mathematically sound even when their notation is unconventional. And sometimes there is an error—but understanding the error requires more than putting an X beside the answer.
Our subject matter expertise should help us determine what the student's work actually tells us about their mathematical thinking. Before you mark a mathematics answer wrong, ask these five questions:
Put This Into Practice
Is the mathematics actually wrong? Before correcting the student, solve it yourself. Look at the approach they used, not just whether it matches the answer key or the method you expected. Make sure you're responding to a mathematical error and not simply an unfamiliar strategy.
Does the student's reasoning make mathematical sense? Follow their thinking from beginning to end. What relationships did they recognize? What properties did they use? Is their reasoning valid even if they approached the problem differently than you would have?
Is this a mathematics error or a representation/notation issue? A student may understand the mathematics and still communicate it imperfectly. Determine whether the issue is actually conceptual or whether the student needs support with notation, vocabulary, organization, or representation.
Can the student explain what they did? Ask before you assume. “Tell me how you got this.” “What were you thinking here?” “Why did you make this decision?” A conversation with the student may reveal mathematical understanding that isn't immediately visible on the page.
What does this response tell me to do next? Assessment should give us information. If the student is wrong, identify where the reasoning broke down. If the student is right in a way you didn't expect, determine what their approach reveals about their understanding. Either way, the response should tell you something about what comes next.
When those professors laughed at my students' work, what bothered me wasn't simply that we disagreed about the answers. It was how quickly a judgment had been made about students before anyone stopped to understand their mathematics. That's why subject matter expertise matters so much when we assess student work. We have to know enough mathematics to recognize correct thinking when it doesn't look the way we expected—and to understand incorrect thinking well enough to help students move forward.
Ready to Build Real Instructional Design Expertise?
If this story sounds familiar, know your voice belongs in the room. Join the DOPE MATH® Design Lab where you build the subject-matter expertise, standards fluency, and confidence to make intentional instructional decisions — not just deliver the pages someone else wrote.
Register for the DOPE MATH® Design Lab Today → https://www.dopematheducator.com/math-design-lab
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