Kind of sad but kind of not

By this point in the semester, I can almost predict what grade someone will earn before I look at their paper.

Super-competitive tightly-wound guy will get 100% or damn close to it (and if he doesn't, he'll try arguing for points).

Speshul Snowflake woman will talk a big deal about how good her project is, but it'll be a half-assed B at best.

Compulsive Man will go way beyond what the assignment required and will earn a 100% (or even if he didn't dot every last i that I expected, he will earn it out of sheer overkill on other stuff)

Slacker Dude will earn a 60% - at best.

Never-there-Girl will pull maybe a 60, maybe a 70, depending on whether she read the assignment closely or not.

Quiet-but-takes-good-notes-person will score somewhere in the low 90s at least.

So far, of the papers I have, I've graded Quiet-but-takes-good-notes, Compulsive Man, and Super-Competitive Tightly-Wound guy. Par for the course. And I flipped to the next paper - Slacker Dude. He left out a major part of the assignment, I can tell even before I read it, because he has one size-16-font page with a bulleted list on it instead of a narrative, which is what I asked for.

Students claim sometimes that profs stereotype them and grade accordingly. Well, I'm not so much stereotyping (I still read all the stuff and hope against hope that one of the low achievers got their act together THIS time) as noting patterns that seem to recur.