Along with John Lithgow '67 acting as the marshal for Arts First, there is at least one other Harvard universal.

Two papers, a mid-term, a final and section participation.

The Core.

On the first paper, you get a B-, maybe a solid B if you are lucky. Then comes the mid-term. The teaching fellow warns you she'll grade harshly. She usually does.

Then there's the second half of the semester, and suddenly, magically, your grade rises. By the end of the class, you've managed to extract an A- or B+. Sanity intact.

But unless professors deem it so, there are not any hard and fast rules governing Core grading, according to Susan W. Lewis, the director of the Core program.

"It has been our experience that a range of grading practices exist but that individual faculty do not have one way of approaching grading in their Core courses and a different set of practices for their department courses," she says.

Indeed, say professors and teacher fellows teaching the Core, there is so much variation between academic subjects that some courses cannot help but use different criteria to grade.

Class participation in Senior Preceptor Marlies K. Mueller's popular Foreign Cultures 22: "La critique sociale a travers l'humour," is based on in-class skits, dialogues and enthusiasm. In math-oriented Science cores, it is often based on showing up to section and turning in homework assignments.

As with all courses which use teaching fellows to grade students, the Faculty pressures professors to make sure students are fairly evaluated.

"I would hope all of our professors in the Core work to insure uniform grading standards across the sections in their classes," writes Dean of Undergraduate Education William M. Todd in an e-mail message.

"Professors will establish grading standards which may, in some cases, be lower than those the teaching fellows were prepared to apply," he writes.

But there are some differences in standards that students seem to notice.

"I think in the Core there is a little more pressure to have grade distributions be consistent across courses, so that students are not rewarded or punished for choosing, for example, one Moral Reasoning course over another," writes Joel Johnson, a graduate student in government who served this year the head teaching fellow for Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice," in an e-mail message..

"In departmental courses, there seems to be a bit more leeway; there is not the same amount of concern over whether departmental course x is grading on the same scale as departmental course y."