Unlike traditional grading, in which you receive a grade for every assignment and exam, contract grading gives you more flexibility and more responsibility for your final grade. The chart below outlines the amount of work required to earn each grade. In short, you should remember four issues:
- Quality. To earn credit toward your grade, you must earn a green evaluation from your supervisor, which signals that your document is of sufficient quality to be distributed to its intended audience. (See “Evaluation” below.) Quality is defined as:
- Appropriate style, content, design, etc. for the specified audience, purpose, and context;
- Content that is complete, accurate, persuasive, and based upon reliable, documented evidence;
- Clear, logical organization that provides coherence within the document, including an introduction, conclusion, and transitions between sentences and sections;
- Professional style and syntax that adheres to the conventions of U.S. spelling, grammar, and punctuation; and
- Professional, usable design of the document and graphics that adheres to conventions of the genre.
- Quantity. The rubric spells out the terms for each grade. Doing more work will usually allow you to earn a higher grade, although quantity does not outweigh quality.
- Deadlines. You must meet all of the deadlines, but as long as you’re doing high quality work, you can submit assignments early.
- Reflection. Each assignment must be accompanied by a reflection that indicates which rubric elements are present and describes your decision and development processes.
Quality Evaluation
The quality of your documents will be evaluated in terms of their readiness to be distributed to their intended audience(s). The supervisor will indicate readiness using the following codes:
- Green Light: The document is ready to be distributed to its audience with few or no minor revisions. Your supervisor is impressed with the professionalism and clear understanding of purpose, audience, content, expression, organization, style, and mechanics. You demonstrated an excellent analysis of the writing situation. You may move on to the next assignment.
- Yellow Light: The document is not quite ready to be distributed to its audience. Your supervisor requires you to make some minor revisions and resubmit for approval. The document is geared toward an audience and accomplishes its purpose, but could use improvement in organization, style and syntax, design, or level of detail in content. If you choose, you may begin the next assignment with caution as you finish the current one.
- Red Light: The document is not ready to be distributed to its audience. Your supervisor is disappointed in the quality of the document and requires you to make a significant revision and resubmit for approval. The document demonstrates a deficiency in content, organization, concept of audience, mechanics, and/or style need attention. It's possible that your supervisor is trying to find someone to replace you on this project. You must continue to work on the current assignment.