Have you ever graded students' work?

Not exactly, but sort of.

For a couple years in the 1990s, I was a member of a grant-reading / assessment committee in my state. Libraries across the state would put in requests for LSTA money (LSTA being a passthrough device to get federal money to deserving libraries in each state.)

There were a half dozen of us on the committee; each year that I served on the committee, we received 60–70 proposals for funding. The dollars that were requested far exceeded the amount that we had to distribute.

So there were some similarities to grading papers.

Some of the grant proposals were well written, cogent, followed directions, and made a persuasive case. They usually got funded. The equivalent of a 100 score.

Some of the proposals were (apparently) dashed off the night before the deadline – weren’t proofread, didn’t hang together, and the numbers (dollars) didn’t add up. These were the failures – never got a cent.

And then were the proposals in the middle – some better, some worse, some not worth funding, some needed more work, etc. Just like students and test score.

Yes, when I was a writing instructor. We graded holistically with comments more than grades. i actually can’t remember whether we assigned grades on individual papers.

Scored/graded Algebra quizzes for my aunt (she was a university Math professor) it was late 1950’s and I was 10 years old. Got paid a penny per student quiz. Some weekends I’d get 75 or 80 cents.

Yes, as a grad student, I have done so. I have graded assignments and read papers (with the professor having the final say). It can be monotonous, especially if you are reading several papers all on the same topic. At the same time, it gave me some insight on how my papers have been graded and how to improve them.

Not graded as per say but had to go through 3000 resumes a day highlighting the specifics of the job and had to look for and highlight the actual words that were in the job description like:
Supervised,organized,filed,computer literate, etc
If not on there application it was discarded.
This was to satisfy the Union since some Personnel Officers were sending in there friends and relatives in hopes of getting the job.
Screening them out first then a second criteria was used to eliminate those that made typos and spelling etc
Then and only then a list of applicants were made and scheduled for an interview, while the others were discarded.
The simple act of noting the words that describe the duties of the job that one was applying for usually got to the last stage easily.
This was for a Large City Human Resources Office.
I learned that being aware of what the job was asking for and if I had the qualifications for that then I had a chance as long as I did not make any typos or spelling errors.
Also at that time ( 1980–1990’s) I also learned to type up the applications and photocopy several at a time and left the job line blank until I found one that I liked and retyped that one to suit the job applied for.( not sure if this is relevant nowadays as applicants can now fill out these online and submit right away.

Yes. I absolutely loved the essays the students wrote.

I consider our housestaff students of servitude & often grade them accordingly.
A suitably high marking rewards an employee of the week certificate, while anyone performing badly is summarily fired on the spot.

Yes. Many students write some pretty awful college essays.

Yes, as a teaching assistant in grad school. I graded the lab portions of both embedded programming courses I was responsible for. In the first if their project did not work but they commented their code well I was often able to easily spot simple errors like typos and give them full credit for using the proper methods. I was always busy during my office hours and I gained a very deep understanding of the material. The second course the professor used an automated program to test and grade their code. I just had to run it and then run a script to record and email their grades. I learned nothing myself and the students grades were pretty bad in labs. Almost nobody came to my office hours.

I taught pre-calculus many years ago as an adjunct faculty at a community college. I find it difficult to teach without giving explanations. I was taken aback when a student told me after two or three classes that he was transferring to another class because he has no interest in mathematical explanations. He was taking the class because it was required and all he wanted were mechanical methods for solving problems.

The one smart thing that I did was to give a test at the beginning of the course to see what the students knew. I found a large discrepancy and aimed for somewhere in between, closer to the low end.

I overestimated my teaching ability and very sadly gave a failing grade to a few students.

My older sister (by 14 years) was a high school English teacher. When visiting her house, she would occasionally plunk down a stack of essays in front of me and ask for my help grading them.

I hated it, as I did not feel nearly as qualified to do her standards justice, despite working on an English degree in college.

On the flip side, and many years later, I facilitated a two-week training class for new hotel managers. One fell during the “Bring Your Child to Work with You” week. A co-worker arranged to bring his son to work, and I volunteered to have him sit in on on of the lessons, complete the class assignment, and then grade the participants’ answers.

I graded his “homework” first, and he had 100% correct. He was shocked at the number of participants that didn’t. The answers were multiple choice.