I found this article, Fairness in Assessment, which highlight the issue of whether it is fair to grade students at the same level or should it be considered the cultural background a factor that might affect the performance of the students. This article, talks specifically about students who are non-native English speakers. Well I am a non-native English speaker, and for me one of the hardest parts of learning English was writing because you cannot translate the language. If you do that, then, it is going to be grammatically incorrect and is not going to make sense at all. It is like adapting yourself to writing in a new fashion. I still have some doubts when writing in English and I am always careful with my grammar. I try to do my best to sound as good as possible when I speak and write. Therefore, sometimes it is a double work, the first part it is putting all my ideas together in English, and the second part is trying to correct the grammatically mistakes that I might had done unconsciously because is a new language, a new culture, a new fashion.
So what is the role of the teacher? Should he/she consider that those students who are non-native English speakers are in disadvantage while writing essays? Should the teacher be harder when grading a native English speaker? I feel that these questions are difficult to answer because the teachers need to be fair with all the students. So what are we talking about when we talk about being fair? Also a truth fact that it is mentioned in this article is that most of the time students compare their works and grades. So what happens if two students think that they did a similar work, but they achieved different grades? This happens all the time in schools, so what can we do to explain them this issue about cultural background difference?
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~smx/PGCHE/fairness.html
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This is a very complex issue. Personally I feel that it would never be fair to grade differently based on culture, race or background. However, I feel that being a non-native speaker has nothing to do with culture or race. It has to do with attempting to aquire a very complex set of skills in a short period of time when all of your peers have been developing the skills since birth. This would be like trying to compare someone who just completed their first swimming lesson with Michael Phelps. Of course I do not think that non-native speakers should never be graded on the same scale as native speakers, but I think they should be given intensive extra help and sufficient time to catch up!
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