Another one who finds it odd that the teacher would have shown an exam to compare if the grade was truly unfair.
Another vote to do nothing. There will always be teachers like this, even in college.
Another vote for letting it go. Much grading is pretty subjective, that’s just the reality. The only time my d19 has ever gone over a teacher’s head to make a complaint was when the PE teacher tried to base part of a grade on BMI. My d’s grade was fine, but she was furious about it on behalf of other kids. I let her handle it and just told her to let me know if she wanted or needed me to be involved. She didn’t need anything from me aside from editing the letter she wrote at her counselor’s request describing it.
@skieurope The point of my personal anecdote was that at my kid’s school, for whatever invalid reason they had, someone had made a policy decision that they would only address a clearly unfair situation if parents complained, and that they would not respond to student complaints. That was an awful policy for any number of reasons, including the fact that 10-15% of the students had parents who spoke little or no English, and a few students effectively had no parents at all. I thought they should have been encouraging students to resolve issues themselves, and as a general matter the school gave lip service to that ideal. In practice, however, at least in this instance, they seemed to want to deal only with parents.
I don’t know how it is with FL grading, but in my courses it can be VERY difficult to make sure that you are grading consistently across different papers. I often grade one problem at a time without breaking during a given problem-grade. Even at that, it is sometimes necessary to shuffle back and forth between papers to make sure the same wrong answer gets the same point score for everyone who made it.
Also surprised that a teacher would show OP’s D someone else’s paper, which is a potential FERPA violation.