On Grading

Cleaning out my Journals (and sharing the best bits):

"Daisies by Ellen Laird, TETYC 1998

"If a student has revised a piece successfully to warrant a legitimate B and learned while doing so, must the B become a warranty from me that he/she can write consistently elsewhere at a B level? Would the warranty be good for the student’s academic life, for the student’s “real” life, or only for about 90 days?"

"Personalizing the Grading Scale for Beginning Writers" by Carter and Rockson, TETYC 1998

"Our system uses a personalized, flexible standard that challenges each student’s particular starting skills as a writer. It begins from a “ground-zero” determined by the student’s first paper. No matter how “good” or “bad” that paper may be, in traditional terms, it becomes the student’s starting point and the standard against which the next paper will be measured. This is what we mean by a “personalized” standard. Each new paper a student writes is measured only against his or her previous effort. Students earn rewards for demonstrated progress between papers, leading to a final grade that reflects a student’s total progress over the semester.

"The student’s first paper—the “preliminary” paper—is not graded. (Indeed, no papers are graded—if, by “graded,” we mean assigned one of the five symbolic letters.) Instead, we comment on the work, noting strengths and weaknesses in five fundamental areas: originality, organization, development, sentence skills, and mechanics. It is imperative that teachers determine which elements of writing they wish to evaluate and then define them as clearly and as specifically as possible. (Here is where a teacher can shape the system to meet his or her needs.) For future reference, we record our impressions of each paper, and these notes, not the paper itself, become the standard for evaluating the student’s next effort. We then encourage the student to do more of what he or she has done well and to do better where he or she has not done so well."