I have to admit that I was a bit disheartened to read the following quote in the Bean text:
"'Out of the 300 essays graded, 101 received every grade from 1-9; 94 percent received either seven, eight, or nine different grades; and no essay received less than five different grades'" (256). I know that grading essays will always be somewhat subjective, but I didn't think it was that subjective. It makes me wonder how some students (such as those of us in this class) have managed to receive consistently high grades on papers, despite this wide variance in grading. I also wondered if we could all, as a class, go through a grade norming exercise this semester, so that we have a better idea of the consensus about what types of papers should receive what types of grades.
I appreciate Bean's explanation of and guidelines for analytic and holistic grading, and I think that an analytic approach may be better suited to me, since I'm very detail-oriented. I think that looking at a paper holistically could be difficult for me, since I sometimes have trouble separating the forest from the trees. However, I'm concerned that my attention to detail will make it difficult for me to limit myself to the 20-30 minutes per paper that Curzan and Damour suggest. The suggested grading scale on p. 264 in the Bean text looks to me like it may offer the best of both worlds, since it breaks the essay down into manageable parts but avoids being too detailed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Leta,
I've had to grade papers for a course before, and the professor I was assisting never really gave me a rubric. We just sat down and read through a few essays and made sure I was assigning the same grades he was. I ended up being a little tougher than he was (but it was an Honors course, so he graded a little higher regardless).
At times I felt like it was slightly arbitrary (to grade at all, not my method of assigning grades!), but after a while I got a feel for it — you start to learn the students a little better, and you see how they're improving...or not, fate forbid. I came to be surprised at how easy it was to distinguish an A paper from a B, a C, or a D.
I really get concerned about rubrics as well. Last semester, I saw that Jennifer Hertlein had an excellent rubric that she handed out to students with her assignment sheets. I talked to her about it and she said it was "pretty standard," but I think it's a great idea to hand them to the students so they can't guilt you about it later that they "don't know what you're looking for."
-ktz
Post a Comment