The golden rule of grading

A couple of weeks ago, Jackie posted about grading and linked to an online essay by Maja Wilson, author of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment (Heinemann, 2006). The essay was so interesting that I ordered Wilson's book and read it this weekend. (And yes, I was avoiding grading by reading about grading. Yes, I am now procrastinating even more by blogging about grading. Yes, I am aware of the irony.)

Wilson's primary argument is against rubrics as a means of evaluating and grading papers, and so in some ways there was no good reason for me to read the book because I already don't use rubrics. I tried using them in my first year at FGS and abandoned them quickly. I immediately found that I simply couldn't use the type of rubrics that have so many points for thesis, so many points for organization, etc.; I wound up having to fudge all the grades because I was inadvertently failing everyone! So I moved to a more general rubric, in which I identified A, B, C, etc. definitions for things like thesis, organization, etc., and the I would highlight which statements best characterized each essay. But really, all of that effort was mostly about supporting my grades so as to cut down on student complaints. Also, I wound up writing an entire paragraph for each essay anyway, because the rubrics didn't cover all that there was to say and wound up saying only the vaguest and blandest things about any given essay. Plus, there's always the problem that papers can be B papers in a whole bunch of different ways that didn't seem covered by the rubric. So after my first year at FGS, I just stopped using them and mostly stopped worrying about it, except when a colleague would talk matter-of-factly about rubrics every once in awhile. (This is mostly social studies colleagues; I'm not sure that anyone in the English department other than the chair uses them, and I think she uses them only for timed essays.)

I felt better about this apparent failure on my part to use rubrics when reading Ch. 3 of Wilson's book, in which she points out that rubrics with point values are determinist in the ways of a mathematical model, working on the assumption that the factors of an essay work together in always predictable ways. She argues that rubrics would work for something like billiards, for "If I hit a billiard ball with a specific amount of force in a certain direction, it will move in a predictable way." Writing, however, "may not be a simple system like billiards, subject to the laws of determinism. Writing may more closely resemble complex, chaotic systems like global weather, economic systems, or political unrest" (32). Somehow this metaphor alone made me feel much better about my "inadequacy" in this arena! As Wilson notes later, "the reductive nature of rubrics makes them unsuitable for capturing what we value about writing" (57). As I said to a student on Friday, when she wanted to know what she could do to raise her B+s and A-s to A's (does anyone have a good answer for this? I don't!), writing is as much art as science; the goal isn't to be replicable! (The student -- a bright, interesting young woman -- was clearly not happy with my lack of straightforward answers.)

But since I don't use rubrics anyway and didn't need to be convinced to abandon them, I was more interested in what she had to say about how grading should happen rather than how it shouldn't. And I really liked what she had to say about the "golden rule of assessment": "assess others as you would be assessed" (43) -- a good rule for us all to keep in mind, when we're tempted to spend more energy noting the errors rather than the good things about a paper. Wilson quotes Lawson, Ryan, and Winterowd: "When teachers read student papers, they inevitably read against the grain ... by approaching student writing with a skepticism quite unlike their approach to most other texts" (30).¹ Wilson continues in her own voice:

The consequences of this skepticism are great. In our search for mistakes, we often miss potential. We should never assume that student papers will be perfect; our job is to help students realize what they cannot yet do. This involves a subtle but important shift in our view of the texts they create. It means that we articulate for them what they have succeeded in doing, explore the meaning in what they have written, and help them connect what is not yet there to what could be there. (30)

She provides examples of having her own work (including the draft of this book) read and commented on by colleagues and outside readers and argues that we should treat our students' texts as we want our own texts treated. In her online essay, Wilson talks about responding to a set of student drafts and realizing that she was "thinking like a writer -- synthesizing information, making sense, looking for patterns, constructing a message, thinking about my audience, PERSUADING, really. And all these things I love to do."

Okay, on the one hand, I totally agree. I read this online essay a couple of weekends ago, as I was in the midst of reading drafts from my students, and it was absolutely true -- I was having a good time responding to their essays as I would as a writer thinking about my own work. (It helped that they were writing analyses of advertisements and had almost all chosen different ads, so each essay was distinctive, eliminating the major boredom factor.) I actually enjoyed reading their drafts and giving them feedback about how to make the essays better as they revised.

On the other hand, I'm a different kind of writer than my students are, in that I write for intrinsic reasons, whereas most of them write only for extrinsic reasons. And she might argue that this means that my assignments are inherently not meaningful for them, which may be true; of course, she teaches a course in personal narratives and thus taps into students' self-interest in a way that my academic assignments aren't going to, but I'd say that students need traditional forms of writing as well. But I'd say that the different kind of writer that I am, when compared to my students, means that we respond differently to the writerly feedback that we're given and are aiming for different goals in our revision; of course, this may be, in Wilson's words, an indictment of "our acceptance of the artificiality of school" (45).

Also, one must eventually assign grades, and Wilson is actually not so helpful on this front. She quotes approvingly from Linda Christensen's "Moving Beyond Judgment," in which Christensen says that she never grades student essays, but quite frankly I couldn't figure out Christensen's grading system at all (even using the sidebar, which Wilson quotes [81-83] but which doesn't show up in the online publication). I quite agree that we can respond more helpfully to students at the draft stage, but -- as is only too clear after my grading session today -- many of my students simply aren't motivated to respond to my writerly feedback and improve their work. Wilson is one of those noble public school teachers (which I say with out a hint of snark -- I really do believe this) who is working with poorer kids in a world that devalues their voices, and she has great stories to tell about not grading their personal essays and thus letting their powerful, unique voices shine through, and I say, "Amen!" But it's not clear to me how this translates to my college-prep independent school where I'm supposed to be challenging the children of the elite (for the most part), even when they don't want to be challenged. At the same time, it occurs to me that I was probably not Wilson's intended audience anyway, since I've never graded by simply putting a number or letter on a paper without any comment, and since I'm not a slave to any externally imposed grading system.

Two weeks ago, I responded to drafts as I would want my own drafts responded to; it was all very much in line with Wilson's golden rule of assessment. This weekend, on the other hand, I've been reading revised versions, finding most of them fairly uninteresting (with some notable exceptions, of course), and assigning grades, as well as providing feedback in case they choose to include this essay in their end-of-year portfolio and thus want to revise further. And I'm not thinking like a writer so much anymore, but rather like a teacher who needs to assign grades.

Years ago, back in Grad School, I taught a comp course in which I didn't assign any final grade until the end of the term; every single assignment could be revised as many times as a student wanted, and essentially they received only one final grade, in their end-of-term portfolio; there were things I loved about this system, although I think it added stress for some students. I'm not sure that such a system would be possible in my current circumstances; even if the school would allow it, could I read 60 or so portfolios at the end of every single term? It's a little mind-boggling. What we do for the juniors is to allow them to revise anything from the year for their end-of-year portfolio, which takes the place of a final exam, but even then I'm not sure it's what Wilson has in mind. But I'll say that one weakness in her otherwise very thought-provoking book is that she's much better at pointing out what's wrong in current systems than in proposing a workable solution.

Okay, I know at this point that the writerly advice I'd be given on this blog post is that I've rambled hither and yon and really should wrap this up and, preferably, revise to make my points more concisely. I, however, am going to take a page out of my students' book and ignore all of this helpful advice, simply turning in a final version that is barely changed from my very first draft. Plus, I have to get to bed so hat I can get to bed and thus be ready to get up early in the morning and finish the grading that I didn't do this weekend because I was so busy reading about how to be a better grader!

¹ B. Lawson, S. S. Ryan, and W. Winterowd. 1989. Encountering Student Texts: Interpretive Issues in Reading Student Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Comments

[Jackie]

Of course, I enjoyed this post! I agree with you on the lack of a workable solution. Sometimes I think I should figure out a hierarchy for what I think is most important, most crucial, to do correctly in a five-paragraph essay. Is it organization within paragraphs, is it structure as exemplified by optic sentences, is it evidence used to support each topic sentence, is it mechanics and grammar, or is it that ever-abstract originality of thought? I think I can settle on those as categories, but how to rank them? And how to measure, in a way students can grasp, where they fall on this scale? And what about effort/progress-- a student who has been diligently working to improve structure, and has definitely gotten better, but still is a little wobbly. How to grade them?

What I have also used is a cover sheet that lists characteristics based on the loose categories I've outlined above, and then I give each a check, check plus or a minus sign. Then I look at the group of one class's essays and see how many checks, check pluses I gave out and how many minuses, and then decide how many of each will put them in what grade range. Then I write some comments at the bottom, in addition to text comments. Very scientific, right? Sigh.

I've also read of people deciding on a few factors to grade on, and then changing those factors from essay to essay, staggering them as the students build their skills. Of course, the student would know what these factors were ahead of time. I'm unsure about this process too-- still seems pretty murky.

And yes, I currently have ungraded papers piled in my bag while I sit here writing about grading!

[Rev Dr Mom]

It's fascinating to me to hear you think through how you respond to writing. I taught psych, not English, but I required a lot of writing, and I took a course in "teaching writing" to help me b/c the students clearly were struggling (in many cases). I finally started using a rubric b/e the students were highly dissatisfied with a grade with comments (unless of course, it was an A). The rubric did well for handling the mechanics--proper citations, APA format, etc. But the truth is, even using a rubric, for me it always came down to a least partly subjective assessment on my part--this reads well, it conveys the message it started out to convey, etc.

I have to say that I DO NOT MISS grading papers, at all, no way!

[nik]

This is so helpful as I go into my writing workshops trying to teach my students how to respond to each others' work as well as I continually try to adapt my own method of response. My response style has run the gamut of rubric, check mark, positive comment in margins, no margin comments only long narrative comments, to tracking changes in electronic documents. What I like here is the "golden rule" of grading. Who doesn't respond better to positive reinforcement. If I tell the students what they do well, won't they leap at the chance to do well again?
Thanks for this smart post. I'll share it with my students as we move forward in learning how to be better responders to writing.