Grading, Feedback, & Handling the Paper Load
Wherever we AP teachers gather, we moan about grading papers. Although teachers read as fast as they can, the pile of unread essays just seems to grow taller. Guilt mounts. We start fantasizing about accidentally leaving a stack of papers atop the car and losing them to the wind. We consider driving to the Pacific and consigning the pile to the ocean. We think about changing careers.
Most articles presume effective feedback should be timely, legible, and focused on guidance or motivation, not grade justification or copyediting. The following principles and strategies are repeated in the research.
Responding to Student Writing by Nancy Sommers
More than any other enterprise in the teaching of writing, responding to and commenting on student writing consumes the largest proportion of our time. Most teachers estimate that it takes them at least 20 to 40 minutes to comment on an individual student paper, and those 20 to 40 minutes times 20 students per class, times 8 papers, more or less, during the course of a semester add up to an enormous amount of time.
Self-diagnostic assessment offers basic writing teachers the opportunity to begin their course by engaging students in a dialogue about writing. Unlike traditional diagnostic assessment, self-diagnosis explicitly acknowledges and values the rhetorical expertise of the student writer. In this study, two students' responses to a self-diagnostic prompt are analyzed for their effectiveness both as articulations of the students' concerns and as diagnostic tools for the writing instructor.
I decided to investigate options to traditional grading late one night when I was plowing through yet another stack of student essays. I felt I was putting more effort into grading the papers than my students put into writing them. I agonized over points: Is this one a 79 or an 80? It’s just one point, but to the student it’s the difference between a C and a B.
Strategies for Fair and Conflict-Free Grading by Stanford University
Make a plan for evaluating the students and stick to it. Evaluation procedures should be decided on when the course is in the planning stages. If you are working with teaching assistants or colleagues, meet with them and decide what kinds of evaluation methods are to be used. Then decide how the students’ work should be graded and what proportion of the final mark each assignment, quiz, etc., will comprise.
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