Philosophy (or Treatise) on Grading Writing
Grades are a means by which we articulate the standards and expectations we hold as instructors, and students know this and respond accordingly—even nervously. These grade-related ambitions and anxieties reflect in the writing our students do (and do not do) in our classrooms, for better or worse. Therefore, it is important to me to come up with solutions that appropriately, fairly, and productively grade student work. Rubrics and course design are key ways by which I consider these issues.
Professors rarely used rubrics in my undergraduate coursework in history and creative writing. In my creative writing classes, I almost never knew where I stood in the course, but I learned to accept this uncertainty as the norm. In history coursework, I knew a good grade was contingent upon a thorough paper writing and revision process, built upon regular feedback from my professor—not my peers. These grade uncertainties kept me active in the work of my classes as I sought, as best I could, to work in a way that reflected progress and engagement.
These experiences shape my expectations as an instructor. Nevertheless, I generally appreciate rubrics, because I think they offer transparency and relieve the anxieties of new college students. Furthermore, they are efficient. When I grade, I move quickly down the boxes, assigning points accordingly. The Canvas course management system adds the sections up for me for the final score. In the rare cases when a student leaves out a component of the assignment, the rubric allows me to determine the appropriate point deductions in a fair, pre-determined way. As a busy graduate instructor, this is helpful.
My qualm with rubrics, however, is that they can feel like a checklist for a completion grade instead of a mechanism by which I might reinforce (and reward) rigor, critical thinking, excellent research, and analysis. A student may have included an annotated bibliography, for example, but are these entries thorough and thoughtful? How much should I “count off” if it is decent but not excellent? How might we define an excellent annotated bibliography for an undergraduate student, anyway? At times, I fear “just doing it” is enough for the purposes of rubrics, and I am not comfortable conflating completion with quality. Meanwhile, a rubric must allow room to reward the strongest submissions that go beyond completion and evidence careful engagement with the materials. I feel confident that rubrics are useful for me and to the students in the first-year writing classes, yet these rubrics must be designed so that they clearly articulate what excellence, not completion, should look like—in other words, what it might look like to excel (and thus earn full points) on any particular component—so that we can assess to what extent student’s work meet those standards. Of course, this is only possible if I give students the tools they need to learn how to reach these standards, reflected in the lectures, example models, and peer review sessions in the classroom. We must talk about the standards before we grade on them.
Certainly, these rubrics—and, thus, these grades—are contingent upon the assignment and the course at hand. It is harder to evaluate proposed Wikipedia edits to standards of rigor than it would be in, say, a traditional rhetorical analysis paper, and this shapes the ways that we can and should grade. I will continue to use rubrics for now, but they should be re-shaped and re-evaluated depending on the course.
