Grading

My boss is one of the professors teaching a course in the biochemistry department here at the medical college, and he handed me the answers submitted for his question on the last exam. He’s going to do the actual grading, my task is just to rank them from best to worst to see how his and my judgments compare. I don’t know what exactly was covered in class, but the question is about the sort of thing I do for a living here, so I do know how much sense the answers make.

It’s tricky. Some people pretty much got the first part, some people at least kind-a get the second part, and a few have some clue about both. How to rank them? Is a hand-wavy but correct description as good as a detailed but not-quite-correct drawing of structures? Then there is the other category: people who apparently missed that lecture. Some people don’t know about what the question asked, but figured they’d write a page about something they do know. Some people apparently didn’t read the question. Is leaving the page blank, implying that you don’t know the answer, better or worse than filling it up with something that proves that you don’t know?