SOME IDEAS FOR EVALUATING STUDENT WRITING
(without going crazy!)
Our workshop on "How to Evaluate Student Writing Without Going Crazy!", gave participants an opportunity to practice "marking up" a sample paper and comparing our responses. The subsequent discussion generated many tips for giving students written feedback:
Always begin your comments by saying something positive about the writing. Writers need to know what parts are effective (clear, original, well-worded, etc.) as well as what needs work.
Marking every error or covering a student's paper with comments will not only drive you crazy -- it may also overwhelm your student. Research has shown that many student writers ignore or react negatively to a large amount of written feedback -- even if many comments are positive!
Correcting students' errors or rewriting parts of their papers makes a lot of work for you, and does not necessarily help them. A better technique -- easier for you and more thought-provoking for the writer -- is indicating an error with a squiggly underline or putting a check in the margin next to the line in which the error occurs.
Criteria for evaluating essays may differ depending on whether or not the student has a chance to revise the writing. Some instructors expect less grammatical and mechanical accuracy on in-class essays.
It's reasonable to require even short-answer in-class essays to be written in complete sentences rather than just lists of words or phrases; the act of putting ideas into sentences requires a higher level of thinking.
[summarized by Beth Kupper-Herr]