"Is Odysseus a hero?" might be the single most commonly assigned essay prompt for The Odyssey, and it endures for good reason: the text genuinely supports multiple defensible positions, from Odysseus as a clever survivor worthy of admiration to Odysseus as a manipulative, sometimes cruel figure whose heroism is deeply compromised.

The grading challenge is that this exact openness makes it tempting for weaker students to write a wishy-washy "he is both a hero and not a hero" essay that never actually commits to a position, hedging every claim until the essay says almost nothing at all.

A strong rubric distinguishes between genuine complexity, where a student takes a clear position but acknowledges counterevidence and explains why their position still holds, and hedging, where a student simply lists evidence on both sides without ever synthesizing it into an actual claim.

This distinction is worth explaining directly to students before they draft, since many genuinely believe that acknowledging both sides of an argument means refusing to pick one, when strong argumentative writing does the opposite: it picks a side and then demonstrates why that side survives the strongest counterarguments.

Evidence That Supports Each Position

Students arguing Odysseus is a hero typically point to his loyalty to his crew and homeland, his cunning in the Cyclops episode, and his perseverance through twenty years of trials. Students arguing against typically point to his crew's deaths, often attributable in part to his own choices, his infidelity during the journey, and the brutal killing of the suitors and disloyal servants.

• The Cyclops episode as evidence of cunning heroism, or as evidence of reckless pride that endangers his crew
• His relationships with Circe and Calypso as complicating his loyalty to Penelope
• The deaths of his crew members as either tragic circumstance or consequence of his leadership choices
• His treatment of the suitors and the disloyal maidservants as either justified vengeance or excessive cruelty
• His reliance on disguise and deception as either practical wisdom or a troubling pattern of dishonesty

A Rubric That Rewards Committed Complexity

Design the rubric to explicitly reward essays that take a clear position while still addressing the strongest counterevidence, rather than defaulting to a rubric that simply checks for the presence of a thesis. A useful criterion asks whether the student's conclusion follows logically from how they handled the counterevidence in the body paragraphs.

Penalize hedging specifically and explain why in feedback, distinguishing it clearly from the acknowledgment of complexity that strong essays demonstrate, since students genuinely confuse the two without direct instruction on the difference.

Discussion Strategies That Improve the Eventual Essays

A pre-writing Socratic seminar or structured debate, where students argue assigned positions regardless of their personal view, tends to produce stronger essays than jumping straight to drafting, since students who have had to defend a position out loud against pushback are better prepared to anticipate counterarguments in writing.

Requiring students to write a one-sentence "strongest counterargument" note before drafting their thesis also tends to produce essays with more genuine engagement with complexity, since the counterargument has already been identified before the student commits to a position.

Feedback That Targets the Hedging Problem Directly

When an essay hedges, the most useful feedback identifies the exact sentence where the student could have taken a stronger position and shows what that revision might look like, rather than simply noting that the thesis is "unclear" or "too broad," which does not give the student an actionable next step.

This kind of targeted, example-based feedback takes real time per essay across a large stack, which is exactly the kind of repetitive but specific feedback that AI-assisted grading tools can help surface consistently, flagging hedging language so teachers can spend their time crafting the specific revision suggestion rather than hunting for the problem first.