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Grading Written Work

Grading Written Work

January 26 and 27, 2005
Presenter: Ken Jones

Imagine that you want to learn something new – something you are going to add to one of your classes.  Most of us, I expect, would start with a book and figure that we’re pretty good at absorbing the new information.

If you are like me, however, when you step away from the book and actually try to incorporate what you have read into what you plan to teach, you discover that your comprehension isn’t all that wonderful.  It isn’t until you actually put that new information into your own words that you really learn it thoroughly and deeply.  Writing, in short, is a way of coming to own knowledge.

As I’m sure you can guess, the research literature shows that the same thing is true for our students:  lots of writing not only improves their communication skills, but it helps them master and use the disciplinary content.  Even though we know that assigning written work would enhance learning, we often don’t ask for as much as might be desirable.

It seems to me there are two key reasons for this.  The first is, as I have heard from a number of people here and on other campuses, “I wasn’t trained as a writer, so I don’t know how to evaluate student papers.”  

The second reason is that evaluating written work does take time.  As I sat down with 36 essays this weekend, I must admit I thought how nice it would be if all I had to do was send a bunch of answer sheets off for machine scoring.

Ok, my goal today is to try to help you chip away at both the “I don’t know how” and the “it takes too much time” barriers.

Let’s start with the “I wasn’t trained to teach writing so I can’t evaluate it” issue.  I’m going to start with a cheap shot: most of us weren’t taught how to teach our disciplines either, but somehow we managed to learn how to do it.  

More seriously, my guess is that we all agree that our majors need to learn to write in a disciplinary appropriate way.  By that I mean a disciplinary style, not just accepted citation format.  Indeed, there is a whole movement out there called “Writing in the Disciplines” (as opposed to the old approach of leaving it to English Composition 1A).  One “Writing in the Disciplines” proponent makes the case this way: “Since writing in higher education involves acculturating students into the always provisional, historically situated knowledge and practices of particular fields, responsibility for writing at all levels of the curriculum properly belongs to faculty hired to teach in these fields.”    In other words, if we don’t teach them that a Lab report is different from a short story, who will?

My third point is that what you are evaluating is really familiar territory.  You are evaluating a student’s ability to communicate effectively in your disciplinary field.   In other words, you aren’t being asked to evaluate their poetic skills, but whether or not they succeed in writing a lower level version of the scholarly work you have done.

Fourth, if you are worried about how to help them improve – as opposed to just evaluating -- keep in mind that for the most part, what keeps them from communicating clearly is confusion about ideas.  This shows up in basics like getting appropriate evidence into coherent paragraphs.  To help them, you need to understand your discipline; you don’t need to know how to explain dangling modifiers.

Fifth, you don’t have to do it alone.   Send students to Writing Center tutors for help.  Call Jane Opitz for help in how to explain something.  Check out resources in LES.  Enroll in a Symposium workshop.

OK, let me move on to some things that can help us enhance learning while keeping the work load under control.  I’ll start with this news flash: there is a way to get better student work without doing anything on the grading end. 

I know that some students write poorly because they don’t put much effort into it, but I’m convinced that for most of our students, the main problem is that they haven’t read enough or written enough to know what good writing looks like.   We therefore can dramatically improve the output simply by doing a better job of communicating our expectations.

One stage of this is simply making the instructions clear.  (And I’m sure I’m not the only one who has learned this the hard way.)

Pharmacy School example on ov.

In addition to the assignment, we need to help the students know what we are looking for – in other words – what does a good version of whatever written assignment we’re talking about look like to us.

            One way is various forms of rubrics.   Handouts.

Here are four examples

These all give significant attention to the mechanics, but you can certainly modify them to push content issues more.  Key is figuring out what matters to you.  (I have more examples if you would like them.)

Rubrics are helpful, but I find that my words don’t always mean the same thing to my students, so I prefer more concrete examples.

Obviously everything I have said in the last few minutes will take up your time – both in planning and in terms of minutes in class.   I would argue, however, that actually being transparent about your expectations will save lots of time on the other end because you won’t have to deal with as much poor quality work.

Ok, what else can I offer you to make grading written assignments more manageable?

I think one thing that creates stress with written assignments and adds to the time it takes to grade them is our effort to be consistent.  It’s the “I gave that one 20 points because it was full of information but didn’t draw any clear conclusions, so what do I give this one that makes a beautiful argument but doesn’t have as much evidence, and what do I do with this third one that is absolutely perfect except that it left out one key point?” 

Let me offer a few suggestions.

The first is that you create a rubric for yourself.  Doesn’t have to be formal, but think through/spell out what you value most.  Start by jotting down outline of what you think an excellent response would look like.  Then ask yourself, what’s the highest they can get if they don’t have x or y?  How many points will I give something that simply lists information?  How much do I value a clear thesis and argument even if it is thinner on evidence?

Second, get a general sense of the papers as a set before you start grading.  Read selected ones quickly to get a sense of how they did – and whether the expectations you have in your rubric are going to work.  Try to get a sense of what the C or B paper is going to look like.

Third, if the assignment has separate parts like short answer versus essay or if it has choices of different essays, read by clusters.  Do all of one short answer and then the next; or all of essay one and then all of essay two.  It is much easier to remember your expectations and be consistent.

Fourth, figure out how you work best.  When I had classes of 80 and 100 in my early years here, I liked to set aside a big block of time and “get into a zone.”  I found that I could move quite quickly and had fewer concerns about consistency if I did, for example, all 50 of the papers that did essay one in a single sitting.  Now I find that I do a much better job if I break up the task and do clusters – an hour or two at a time, rather than just wading through till I’m done.   

Fifth, check for consistency, but don’t go overboard.  Trust yourself.  Go back and read the first one or two that you did and see if you would still give the same grade, but resist the temptation to constantly check back, and don’t read more than a few.   If you have thought through what you want to see, you will find that you are amazingly consistent.

The most important thing I have learned about teaching writing or using writing to facilitate learning is that my goal is not correction – I am not an editor getting an article ready for publication.  I am instead a teacher whose task is to help the student learn how to get his/her ideas across more effectively. 

That’s a critical concept because without it you can’t grasp the wisdom of Jane Opitz and others in the Symposium program who have long reminded us that you can’t teach writing by telling a student everything that is wrong with a paper. 

If you start at the beginning and mark everything, there are three probable outcomes. 

Guess which responses are most likely ---

So, to inspire student learning – and to save yourself some time – here’s what I suggest.

Start by finding at least a couple of things that a student did well, -- things you hope that they will repeat in future papers -- and congratulate them on that.  Important for ego, but also they often don’t know what they did well, and if we want them to continue it, we need to tell them.

When you move on to criticism, I suggest that you ask yourself “what are the two weakest parts of this paper, or what are the two largest barriers to effective communication in this paper, or what two things could Bill fix that would really improve the quality of the work.”  

For me, it is usually a mix of writing/communication issues and missing content/analysis issues.  You can adjust according to your needs.  The first key point is that you look at the paper holistically and ask yourself, what are the biggest flaws.

Then, comment on those TWO (or at most three) big issues, and leave the rest alone.  This may mean that you discuss topic sentences and the failure to provide appropriate evidence – and not say a thing about a disjointed paragraph, misspelled words and grammatical errors.  But so be it.   Remember, you are a teacher, not an editor.  The goal is not perfection, but helping the student progress.  Obviously, as the student grows over the semester, your comments are going to focus on different – hopefully less fundamental – issues.

Keep your comments limited to a couple big issues, but make sure you provide concrete examples.   For example, don’t just tell a student he needs to be more concise or that she needs better topic sentences.  If they did it well somewhere, point to that and contrast it with the weaker version – or if need be, mark up or re-write a small section of the paper to show what you mean.   Just naming (“awkward”) or circling errors doesn’t work cause students made error in the first place because they didn’t know what they were doing.  If possible, frame your criticisms as questions or as suggestions for improvement.  If they left out some important content, you can write “What about x?” rather than “you forgot to cover x.”

I suggest that you do even less if basic grammatical problems such as comma usage or sentence fragments are messing up the paper.  I usually mark one of these, and then in my note at the end tell the student that s/he has a problem in this area, and that they must take the paper to the Writing Center for help on that particular issue.   Writing Centers great for this type of thing – frees you to spend time explaining larger issues where some subject knowledge is required.

I find it really tough to limit myself to the two or three big points.  I’ll catch myself marking simple errors as I read the paper or writing comments in the margin as I go.  Sometimes my pen just does it even though I know this is going to send the wrong message to the student.  Some people solve this by doing a quick first reading without a pen.  I find I can’t do that effectively unless it is a pretty short paper, so I often will jot down two or three single word notes on a piece of scratch paper as I read.  

Actually, my best solution has been to comment on the computer.   Only marks now on student paper are numbers identifying each paragraph, which I use as reference points in my comments.  Find this especially helpful in FYS since keep each student separately and then can see progress or repetition of mistakes.

I’d also like to put in a big plug for repetition.  I’m thoroughly convinced that the more often students do something, the better they get, so as a general rule, I’d prefer to have them do a series of short papers rather than one long one.   Obviously, if you are trying to teach the specific organizational skills that come from a big paper, then you have to go that direction, but otherwise I don’t see the point.  Besides, I think it is easier psychologically to sit down with a stack of short papers than it is to start on a pile of term papers.

Finally, I think we can get our students to a lot of additional writing and thinking with minimal effort on our part by encouraging re-writes.  We put lots of time into comments on papers, but as we all know, most students just look at the grade.  If we want to have our comments contribute to the learning process, institute a re-write policy.  I grade the first version, and then offer up to one full grade improvement if they respond fully to my comments.  It’s their choice to do the additional work.  If they do, I have them turn in both the original and the revised version.  I limit my comments on the revised version to a couple of words on how well they responded to my comments, so it takes very little time to grade. I also like re-writes as a way of convincing students that writing is a process – that you have to do it over and over.  

Other strategies

Journaling on concepts in reading for the day.  

Pre-discussion papers

In-Class writing

Conferences before paper turned in.  

I’m not good at this.  Only way this has worked for me is to have them read the intro, and then I ask them questions from there.  What does next paragraph focus on, how are you going to support that argument.  It does help to solve some content and organization problems before the final paper.

Peer conferences on papers.  

Use peers to eliminate problems, so less work for you, plus it makes students become much better critics of their own work. Works best if you have a clear check list of things for student readers to look for.  I also think it helps if the faculty member evaluates the quality of the peer comments.

Using rubrics to create criteria forms as check lists on writing assignments.

Can save you time in that you can make up grids and check boxes.   Don’t have to write the same thing over and over.  I like it better as a reminder to students – if you use it right at the beginning or with weak writers, it can have the same impact as marking every error.   

Group projects

In some areas, team written papers are very appropriate in terms of what they are going to run into in the real world.   I wouldn’t want to do this all the time, but if you have group papers instead of individual ones, obviously you can cut your grading significantly.  Problem is that you have to also have structures for accountability.

Original Pharmacy School Assignment:

 “Write a 4-5 page review of a frequently used over-the-counter (OTC) or health-care product.  You will be graded on accuracy of information and adherence to proper spelling and grammar usage.”

Revised:



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