I would also grade all exams the first time blind to who the student was and then regrade a half dozen again to make sure that I hadn’t drifted out of grade over the marking process.
I used to play an game with myself (marking is very boring) as to who would get what mark based on my in class knowledge of the student (when you run labs you do get to know the individual students). It was a rare student that got a exam mark more than 10% outside my estimate.
You had to be rather certain that you were sufficiently wronged overall, otherwise a few points more on one question could be offset by a large number of negated points from other questions where the professor thought that the TA might have been too generous.
Then again, the teachers that did it seemed like they were doing it punitively (e.g. subtracting the exact amount of points they were forced to add.)
I could be wrong, but my intuition goes the other way and I'm assuming most students do it to get a better grade, not learn more.
It is the professor's responsibility to grade accurately, and honestly if there is so much inconsistency in grading that there's a significant probability that the student will lose marks despite having pointed out a reason they should gain marks, the professor is screwing up very badly[1]. Don't pin that on the student not having noble intentions or whatever.
[1]:Or at least that's the case in STEM. My humanities friends tell me that grading is much more subjective there which is a bit disturbing but I'm hardly qualified to make such judgments.
Meanwhile, in a less politically charged situation, it's pretty normal, or at least smart, to go back over any area where you messed up with a fine-toothed comb.
If, and this is a rather pessimistic assumption, if the student is likely to lower their grade on a re-test, in my experience it's more likely to be because the original grader was being generous in the face of ambiguity, rather than systemic random errors. That's because the graders are mostly nice people. If that's not good enough for someone, they damn well better have a good reason for it. I have no problem with policy that enforces this. The politics are a distraction from the ethical question.
That's not the same thing as the original, which implied "my grading is so random, hope you're lucky on the rescore".
Edit: I had a high school teacher with a policy where she’d add X points to every score from the get go, and you’dlose those if you objected to grading, so you’d only object for misgrades by more than X. But that’s not the same as the original “okay, let’s roll my truth-recognizer dice again!”
It reminds me of those "drunk driving costs you $15k" ads, where most of that comes from the expense of navigating the court system (bail, attorney's fees), and the state is somehow proud of this fact.
No, that's what the "albeit selectively" clause was referring to.
>I could be wrong, but my intuition goes the other way and I'm assuming most students do it to get a better grade, not learn more.
As in my comment, it doesn't matter. Their job is to be an expert on this material. Failing to correctly label an answer is failing at their job. Punishing someone for pointing out a failure at your job is unprofessional.
One other time, I asked the lecturer (different paper) where I went wrong on a question, and turn's out I was right all along, got that question regraded without the potential downside to a full remark.