This article first appeared in The LINK, the online newsletter from the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT). Claire Lamonica, M.A. ’83, D.A. ’96, regularly shares her observations on student learning, instructional trends, and life in the academy. You can read past installments of “From the director’s desk” at CTLT.IllinoisState.edu/News/Director.
Earlier this month, I had the privilege of working with 16 faculty members in a daylong workshop titled “Got Papers? How to Grade Student Papers and Still Have a Life.” The fact that this particular professional development event, along with its companion workshop, “When Students Can’t Write,” is consistently over-subscribed makes me smile whenever I think of it … and not just because those numbers look good in CTLT’s annual report.
Those of you who know me know that I have a passion for supporting student writers. It’s the reason I became an English teacher, the reason I earned a doctorate, the reason I served as associate director of Writing Programs for seven years, and the reason I continue to offer each of these workshops at least once a year. So it makes me smile to know that even a small portion of that passion is shared by enough of my Illinois State colleagues to keep filling those workshops year after year.
Claire C. Lamonica, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Having facilitated these workshops for a number of years now (and having worked in the first-year writing program and the Illinois State Writing Project for a number of years before that), I have come to understand that (a) many faculty are unhappy with the current state of student writing, (b) many faculty are willing to be part of the solution, but (c) many faculty aren’t sure where to begin and, as a result, (d) many faculty spend untold hours engaged in grading and response practices that may have only limited effectiveness.
This last understanding is, in part, the fault of my own discipline. Scholars in composition and rhetoric have amassed a large body of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the teaching of writing and the support of student writers. Unfortunately, as a discipline we haven’t done a particularly great job of sharing what we know. When that knowledge is shared, it’s often in isolated faculty workshops like the ones I mention above or in more robust Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) or Writing in the Discipline (WID) programs at universities across the U.S.
Part of the problem, of course, is that it’s difficult to distill a body of disciplinary knowledge into helpful and, more important, convincing sound bites. It’s a difficulty all disciplines share. In preparing for and updating the “Got Papers?” workshop, however, I came across a document composed by my good colleague Doug Hesse, a former director of Illinois State’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and current executive director of writing at the University of Denver. Hesse’s list of tips for “efficiently grading student writing” appears below.
If you’ve got a stack of papers on your horizon, take a few minutes to peruse the list and consider whether you might save yourself some time and effort by implementing even ONE of these ideas. If it helps, let me know! I’d also be happy to hear from you if you have questions or concerns about any of the tips. They’re all research-based, so I can fill you in on the relevant scholarship if that would help.
13 Ways of Looking at Grading (with apologies to Wallace Stevens)
Compiled by Doug Hesse
- “Grading” is fairly easy. “Justifying” grades to students is more difficult. “Teaching” students through your grades and responses is even more difficult. Yet we should aspire to teach.
- No professor is capable of making comments so profoundly wonderful that a student will become a perfect writer on the basis of comments on a single paper—or even a set of papers over the course of a semester.
- Set ground rules for yourself, and clearly convey to students what they can and cannot expect in terms of your response. For example, tell them (or include a response sheet that tells them) that your written comments will address only one main strength and one main area for improvement, if that’s what you choose to do. Cover other aspects of the paper with a response or grading rubric.
- “Edit” only a fraction of a paper: a selected paragraph or page. Make clear up front that you do not aspire to be exhaustive. See recommendation 3.
- Make good student papers available to illustrate features of the best work on a particular assignment.
- Develop a response rubric, that is, a list of elements of the paper, with values you can check off. Typical broad criteria include: focus, thesis, argument; organization; clarity of development; quality and quantity of evidence or support; ambition (degree of difficulty); format; correctness; and style. However, each element may look different in different situations. Use general rubrics to develop ones tailored to specific assignments.
- As you write assignments, consider how you might respond to the kinds of writing those assignments might yield. It doesn’t “cheapen” the assignment to reveal criteria to students up front. You may, however, wish to provide more scaffolding to students at the beginning of the semester than at the end.
- Require students to tell you the specific aspect of the paper on which they’d most like to get feedback from you, then reserve most of your comments for that aspect. You might want to give them a menu of features to select from or, at least, explain to them why very general requests won’t yield them much help (e.g. “Does it flow?)
- Have students write a cover memo in which they describe their strategies in writing the paper and what they perceive its strengths and problem areas to be.
- Use brief marginal comments to call attention to “higher order” aspects in the paper, usually content or development. A “good” or a “yes” or a “?” or an “evidence?” go a long way. Use squiggly lines (or what you will) to call attention to sentence errors or hugely rough spots (but remember that your goal should be to teach). Don’t feel compelled to mark everything, and certainly don’t edit everything.
- In courses with multiple assignments (and I’d generally value more shorter assignments than fewer longer ones), give students a “voucher” good for one detailed commentary per semester. They should reserve that for the time they want you to read a paper as you would a manuscript submitted to a journal.
- A reasonable final response strategy: 1. “The most effective aspect of this paper is ___” (or, “The best section of this paper is on page ___”) 2. “The one thing that would most improve this paper or ones like it in the future is ____”
- Every now and then, swap a set of papers with another professor. But resist the urge to show off for your colleague. Agree on some ground rules to keep your time investment within certain boundaries.
