Don't confuse grading papers with
Giving feedback on writing

Grading papers is a necessary part of teaching. Good grading practice requires you to give feedback that promotes student learning along with the grade.

In a school system, we cannot get away from grades and grading. We can, however, reduce the misery of grading and boost student learning.

Here are some practices I use when giving feedback to my students. Read through the list to see which you could borrow or adapt for your classes.

Don't use red ink to grade papers.

Purely from a psychological standpoint, nobody likes to see red ink on their papers. You can use just about any color for your feedback comments except red.

Limit your focus to your objectives.

A big reason we teachers hate grading papers is that we try to look at everything.

Good teaching and grading practices call for giving feedback on fewer but more important issues so as not to overwhelm students or overwork ourselves.

Embed your objectives in grading rubrics.

If you link your rubrics to your course objectives, you make it easy to focus on giving feedback only on writing elements you are teaching.

Having course-specific grading rubrics is especially helpful if you teach courses at different grade levels. Forgetting which standards apply to which course does not rank among the top 10 grading practices!

Give students copies of assessment rubrics.

One of the best grading practices is to make sure students know what they are being graded on.

I give students copies of my grading rubric when I begin discussing the material that will use that rubric. I make a a big deal of pointing out that that the rubric is my outline for what I'll teach and what students need to learn.

Keep a sense of proportion in your rubrics.

Another one of the grading practices I find helpful is to indicate on the assessment rubrics the percentage of total points for each writing component.

I keep the same proportions throughout the year but make each paper worth a larger portion of the students' grades as they gain experience writing. (See a persuasive essay rubric showing my grading proportions.) For example, an early paper might be worth 50 points, while an end-of-course paper might be worth 300.

Proportional grading seems to me to be a fair compromise between maintaining my standards and giving students time to learn what they need to know to earn a good grade.

Proportion grading time to grade proportions.

If you've decided that the content of a paper is worth 70% of students' grades, then you should spend 70% of your grading time giving feedback on the paper content and 30% giving feedback on everything else.

You won't convince students that writing is all about delivering good content clearly if the only comments they see from you have to do with the size of their margins.

Avoid overweight assignments.

Having too much of students' grades dependent on a single assignment is unfair to them and to you.

My personal grading practices avoid high-stakes situations by requiring students to, in effect, earn a certain grade ranking on three essays in a row before I consider them to have earned that grade. View a sample objective designed for assessment by the three-in-a-row standard.

Use symbols to note your initial reactions.

If you give students authentic writing assignments relative to your class content, you are obligated to assess the ideas in the paper before you assess how well the paper is written.

As you read a piece for its content, you can mark passages with signs that indicate how the ideas strike you as you read through:

+ for a good piece of evidence

- for factually wrong evidence

? for some evidence whose accuracy or interpretation you question

This simple system may keep you from jumping to conclusions and wasting time giving feedback that is not warranted.

Let me give you an example.

Josh and Caitlin may exhibit the same problem in their essays about To Kill a Mockingbird, but the one problem may have different causes in the two cases. You may see that a question you had about paragraph 2 is answered later in Josh's paper. You had the same question when reading Caitlin's paper, but she didn't cover the point anywhere in her paper.

You realize Josh needs feedback about his organization, but there's no use giving feedback to Caitlin about better organization because her problem is that she didn't understand the novel. Your feedback to each student should be different.

Do not correct errors or edit papers.

Correcting and editing are the writer's jobs. If you do the writers' work, they won't learn to do it themselves.

Think of it this way: a writing assignment is a test. Does the math teacher work every problem for students who get the wrong answer? Of course not. The math teacher assesses, grades and reteaches as necessary.

Make your comments useful

When you are giving feedback on students' work, you should not only encourage students to continue working toward better skills but give them specific ways to improve their grades.

I recommend you offer two suggestions on each assignment:

• One that will improve student work over the long term.

• One that will result in a better grade on the next assignment.

Practices that result in improvement over the long term include such things as checking the writing skeleton for overlapping elements or employing strategies for developing evidence.

Practices that could pay off on the next assignment are things such as following the directions or editing for one serious error at a time.

Giving students one suggestion that gives a quick grade boost builds your credibility. If you have a couple of good ideas in a row, Josh and Caitlin might be willing to try one of your long-range suggestions.

Find something good to say.

You should always find something positive to say about the student's work. (This is the point at which you show your creative writing skills.) Don't praise shoddy work or improvement that's not happening. If you can't think of anything positive to say about the writing itself, look for positives such as

• Work was submitted on time.

• Student followed the directions for X.....

• Handwriting was legible.

• Appropriate ink color or printer font.

Students may seem to go through the motions of writing for months until something clicks and they start writing.

Sometimes if all you do in teaching writing is keep students from giving up too soon, that's all you need to do.

Make students do some of your prep work.

To save me time, I have students insert copies of the rubrics into papers they submit electronically. Thirty seconds saved on a paper isn't much, but if you're grading 50 papers, the savings amounts to 25 minutes. Also, students can't say they didn't know the evaluation standards if they have to insert the form into their papers.

If students aren't turning in work electronically, you have students complete the identifying information and turn the rubrics in with their papers.

Your repertoire of practices for teaching writing should include techniques for giving feedback on students' writing mechanics.