As I work through a pile of research papers I find great enjoyment in digging through the thesaurus to discover how to describe my task. What is it I am doing while grading these? That is what I must decide. Am I slogging through them? Toiling? Plodding captures my pace, though not the mood of the work. Drudging captures the mood, but perhaps is a bit dramatic. Grinding is good but implies that I am faster than I really am. Sometimes I can work for 15 minutes and grade only one paper; that will not qualify as grinding. Moil I like. It made a recent appearance in our poem of the day, via “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and though it also implies hard and ceaseless work similar to grinding, it seems to withdraw the speed aspect . . .
As I moil through these papers, then, I have been grateful for the method I currently use. It is an adaptation of my World’s Greatest Essay Rubric, something I modeled after my favorite college professor. I have chopped the written assignment into its basic components (no, I do not use the 6-traits as the basic components here) and then have a four-box rubric style scale, creating a table. For most writing assignments, the basic components are
- the introduction,
- the supporting paragraphs,
- the conclusion,
- writing style, and
- directions.
Pretty much anything I want to critique falls under those categories. The description of the quality moves to the right in basic analysis:
- Weak
- Okay, needs some work
- Solid
- Strong
By releasing my rubric from the tyranny of numbers, I am able to call the same box two different things. For a poor writer who just wrote his first attention grabber, ever, I can award a “Solid” without giving him more points than he rightly earns, according to our manner of grading. For a student who writes well and shirked a transition between her attention grabber and thesis, I can say “Okay, needs some work” and still give her the B the paper earns when compared to the criteria.
With research papers, I change the left hand descriptions, choosing to shy away from an over-analysis of the writing, since the bulk of our instruction was devoted to citations and other particulars of research papers. Thus, the left side examines
- Citations
- Sources
- Works Cited
- Writing Style, and
- Organization.
I also shy away from using my pencil too much anymore, as it slows me down. I read the paper with a pencil in hand, marking papers as necessary with small symbols and notes, but whenever I am tempted to comment, I write a number. I then type my comments onto the bottom of the students’ rubric and speak just as I would if I were writing in the margin of the paper. The difference is that I am not trying to squeeze all these words into the margin and am sputtering them out at a clip far superior to my pencil pushing prowess. I will also comment generally within the boxes where I mark students’ scores, so when they receive their paper they have a fairly full idea about what I thought about their paper and what I think they might do to improve it.
The end result is the fastest method I have yet devised for giving useful feedback to students. Unfortunately, it still takes what feels like forever to grade the papers, but there is no helping that, after all.
Thanks for reading.
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- Toil. Dust Bowl Corn Field, ca1937 on Flickr by: erjkprunczyk
- Vedanthangal Miscellany 02 on Flickr by: Pandiyan
I like this a lot! However, I’m having difficulty understanding how you assign the paper the amount of points you do? The rubrics I typically use have points set aside for each category. Can you explain a little more? Thanks!
Posted by Rachel | March 30, 2010, 7:58 amI found that for me the points for each category were part of the problem. I would read the papers and know, wholistically, one might say, what the paper should earn. I’d then tally the points and if the total didn’t match what I thought it should be, I’d revisit the categories’ points and tweak them until the grand total matched what I thought it deserved.
It especially meant that the points were a falsehood–I wasn’t really evaluating everything as separately as the rubric made it look like I was. It also meant that I was wasting good time juggling numbers when I could have simply slapped the B, B+, or A onto the paper and moved on.
Ultimately I have a criteria in my mind about what is possible for my students to produce, and when I read I compare each students’ work to the criteria. It takes place in my head, but the chart I explained above is a breakdown of the things I am examining. When I have a thought about something, for better or worse, that justifies what I am assigning for a grade, I write that thought down, so the grade is not without cause or explanation.
I also make sure that I look down the grades when I finish and see if there are any anomalies. Did a student get a low grade but actually have a paper that was on par with one that got a higher grade? I have caught a few of these.
Generally, at first, I used to consider the four columns in my rubric to align with an A, a B, a C, and a D. I’d then see where the student’s work fell by glancing down the rows and make my overall judgment. Now I am more flexible with how I use those, however.
This all sounds fuzzy, I realize, but I am convinced that writing is a subjective art. Maybe one work of writing is great because it’s introduction captivates the reader so thoroughly that the rest of the work barely matters. I want to leave room for this in my rubric. If a student has a brilliant introduction, but my rubric allows me to award only 10% of the points on the introduction, my grade does not reflect the actual impact of the piece of writing.
The grade is subjective, but as a relative expert in my subject area, I am an appropriate source for rendering judgment. A movie review is similarly subjective, and there is a large amount of debate about particular films, but when you look at the overall spectrum, critics generally agree on the merit of films. If they were grading papers instead of rating films, my hunch is that they might assign scores that would differ by a few points, but rarely would they differ by an entire letter grade.
Thanks for the question, Rachel, and for visiting the blog.
Posted by G | March 30, 2010, 3:37 pmThis post indicates why you are a better teacher than I am. To describe grading, I use an allusion like “emulating Sisyphus” instead of improving my vocabulary with the great word “moil.”
May I steal and adapt the rubric?
Thanks for writing.
Posted by LK | March 31, 2010, 6:34 pmLK:
You speakest me fair. Thank you.
You are welcome to use as much of the idea as would be helpful to you. My hope in discussing it is that it might help others develop something useful as well.
Posted by G | April 1, 2010, 9:40 amI am reading your posts with a folder of research papers at my feet. They do not entice me like your views do. Alas, having read your method for grading, I am inspired to post this, make a similar rubric, and then take the bull by the horns and start moiling myself.
Posted by Donna Kohlruss | April 7, 2010, 10:49 pmThank you so much for sharing this rubric. Grading papers, as you know, is painful: mentally, physically, and even emotionally at times! I just happened to come across this rubric; I think it’s going to cut some of my grading time and still provide meaningful feedback for my students! You rock!!
Posted by Sheryl | March 26, 2012, 6:56 pm