Re: advice anyone?
 

Try appraoching it as honest questions about his reasoning for your grades. Anyone who grades someone else's papers should at least be open to the discussion.

And for the record, having a TA grade a professor's ESSAY TESTS based on his lectures is laughable at best. If it were a multiple choice or even short answer test, I could see it, but an essay test?

So a TA is grading your essay's, which are arguments based on your professor's lectures? How the fuck does that work without bias overwhelming any kind of honest quantatative evaluation?

Re: advice anyone?
 

Right, that's the approach I tried after my first midterm (because I also received an unfounded grade on that test). So I thought that approach would work for the second midterm, but considering I scored worse on this test it obviously didn't.

Exactly. The professor lectures and writes the prompts for the essay midterms. He presents 3 essays and we have to write on one. So basically, the TA is judging the merit of the professor's prompts and our answers to the prompts. It's really ridiculous.

Re: advice anyone?
 

is there a discernable pattern of grading that you can modify your papers with to get a better grade? There's gotta be somethings you've noticed that the TA gives good marks for.....it's all about throwing the bs back at em.

Re: advice anyone?
 

There really isn't. All of my friends in the class have gotten worse grades than me, and I know of no one who has gotten an A on a single midterm.

This is part of my frustration.

Re: advice anyone?
 

hmmm, I'm sure you've discussed this with your friends already, but a strength in numbers approach might be viable. If one of you is elected to do the speaking and as mentioned before you have clear examples of unfair marking ready to present then maybe you could approach the prof with a line of reason. How big is your class?