GRADING ESSAYS
Evaluating ENG 101 and ENG 102 essays is one of the more important of your teaching tasks. Students rely on you to convey to them what kind of progress they are making in the development of their writing skills. Too often, students equate the grade that is assigned to a paper with their progress. If they receive an A, they think that their writing is ‘excellent’ because an A at this university translates into ‘excellent.’ On the other hand, if they receive a C, they think that their work is regarded as substandard by the grader, even though a C translates into average and is a passing grade. Unless students have a clear idea of what kind of writing merits grades from A to F, they will not learn much about their writing progress. Accompanied by notes from the instructor, a grade can be an effective tool in the teaching of writing. Analytic grading, which ‘analyzes’ and evaluates each rhetorical and grammatical component of an essay, is an instrument of assessment and teaching and is most useful during the course of the semester, when students are likely to be handed back their essays with comments and grades. Holistic grading, on the other hand, which evaluates ‘test’ efforts, such as an in-class essay, is an instrument of assessment that weighs the whole essay, rather than a part of an essay. An essay with less than competent grammar skills might be considered passing if enough critical thinking skills, development, and organization are present to adequately communicate an idea. It is a good idea to let students know if you plan to grade holistically or analytically when you define your grading criteria in your syllabus.
Your course’s content or ‘subject’ is composition, which includes students’ ability to think, to communicate in a standard language an organized, coherent, and developed idea. You might want to think of a successful composition essay as one that includes good thinking and good writing skills. As specialists in composition evaluation and assessment Barbara Davis, Michael Scriven Gross, and Susan Thomas conclude, “[t]here is no hope for high standards in composition instruction unless its developers and evaluators learn that even the emphasis on context, mode, and function we sometimes see stressed is not nearly enough. Teachers of reading and writing and speaking have to evaluate thinking or they teach nothing” (The Evaluation of Composition. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 1987, 1981: 39). What you ask your students to write is necessarily enjoined to how you will grade their essays. If you ask your students to write essays that are void of critical thinking, you will get essays void of critical thinking. What will be graded, then, is what Davis et al. find troubling with composition instruction in general: biases on the part of instructors towards over rating grammatically correct and stylistically pleasant essays that lack an appropriate level of reasoning (36-38). On the other hand, showing a bias towards over rating essays that are strong on critical thinking skills, but weak on writing skills, exists among composition instructors also (36-37).
Given the writing biases of composition instructors, you should probably plan ways to avoid bias in your own grading practices. That begins with your assignments. When you design an assignment, make sure that students will be offered the opportunity to reason or the opportunity to be imaginative. Because the subject of the course is composition, the course grade should be based upon composition. Students who cannot write consistently at a C or passing level should not be passed, especially in ENG 101. Students who are writing at the D level will not only find ENG 102 difficult, but they will not write at a level proficient enough to perform well in their other classes. It is not fair or beneficial to students to pass them on to the next level if they are not prepared. Quizzes, homework, or other efforts that are not based upon composition efforts should probably not be weighted more than ten percent.
What makes a writing effort an A, B, C, D, or F effort? A number of factors contribute to an effort’s final grade, not the least of which is whether or not the effort is written in ENG 101 or ENG 102. In both courses, you should treat in-class essays written in timed settings with more leniency than you would those written over the course of several weeks. Essays that have been written in stages, peer-reviewed, or conferenced should be held to a higher standard than those written over the course of an hour. Some writing instructors assign grades to each of the writing stages, so important do they consider each step in the writing process. Also, for those final drafts to which you assign weighty percentages, (such as 25 or 30), you may want to clarify the degree of polish that you require in a final draft. However you choose to grade student papers, you should keep in mind that grades perform a number of functions. As an assessment tool, grades let writers know where their writing stands in relation to university and department expectations, which are relatively universal. Grades let university administrators, advisors, and faculty know, to some degree, how a student has performed in a particular course. As a teaching tool, grades accompanied by comments are useful for encouraging good writing habits and discouraging weak writing habits.
Ultimately, grades are context-oriented. Students who are good writers can receive Fs in writing courses for failure to hand in work-a 0 on one writing assignment of six can easily bring a grade down to an F. The final grade in ENG 101 and ENG 102, thus, does not always indicate that students are writing at particular levels; the best that it can show is that students who fully participate in a composition course are writing at a consistently A, B, C, or failing level. A composition course grade, unlike other course grades, should reflect as closely as possible the level of composition abilities exhibited by students. The final grade in an ENG 101 or ENG 102 course should indicate, thus, at what level students most consistently are writing. Students who manage to write some A papers might not be able to write A papers for every assignment. If they receive a B for the final grade, what that grade indicates is that the student wrote at a level consistent with A-B or B level writing.
The weak writers who manage a few C essays should not be passed on the virtue of those essays alone. If their course average is a D, and they have met all other course requirements, they should probably be assigned a PR. The writing practice that they will receive in another semester of ENG 101 will benefit them in ways that their struggling with an ENG 102 course will not. Students writing at the D or F level who show no signs of progress, despite their full participation in the course and their attempts to meet course requirements, should be assigned a D or an F. Those students are clearly not ready for college level work and should not be encouraged to continue without assistance from appropriate university personnel, such as the Director of Instructional Services (Peck Hall 1405).
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Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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