Holistic Grading

I found a lot of quality instructional information in Chapter 14 "Responding to Student Writing" . First off, it is tragic that universities are starting to feel the pain of “teaching to the test” – I can relate and unfortunately as implied in this reading, the route “standardized” assessments are not an accurate measure of a student’s writing. Unfortunately and as anyone who works as an English teacher can attest to, a “holistic” (Lindemann 245) method of assessing a students’ writing would be so expensive that it will probably never happen in the world of numbers and logic. Although this is a downer, I found some good “holistic” grading methodologies in this reading which I can easily put to use in my classroom.

Lindemann’s approach to “diagnostic reading” stands out to me. Although I usually begin a school year with a timed-writing scenario for my students as well, I do not have the level of organization mentioned here. A point that really stuck out to me was “[w]hen I analyze a first paper, I make notes about what I’ve found on a separate sheet kept in each student’s folder. Students never see my notes, but I refer to them throughout the term” (Lindemann 229). When I read this I was thinking, Dang nebit! Why didin’t I learn strategies like this when I was training to become a high school English teacher? I intend to use this method next year. It makes a lot of sense to have a folder for each one of my students with some notes in regards to the process of their writing. That way when I start reading their writing, I can pull out their file, review my notes and know exactly what I need to be looking for. I realize it may be time consuming at first, but eventually I will become comfortable and efficient with the process – hence it will become beneficial for my students and myself. Speaking of which, I found Lindemann’s comparison of grading styles to be of interest as well.

I’ve never graded papers in manner that Lindemann elected to include in her as a first example of how not to grade “David’s” paper that uses weird abbreviations, symbols and malicious comments. Lindemann’s marks which she uses as a second example of a way to “assess” a paper is more open-ended and perhaps gives the student a more productive mode of feedback. My grading strategy falls more within the camp of Lindemann as I give students some constructive criticism hoping that it will help give them some direction, however, I must point out that Lindemann used this example as something to publish in her book and it makes me wonder if see always gives such a thorough evaluation. With my workload it would be very difficult to do this, which is probably why she goes on to talk about portfolios (250). I do not currently use portfolios, but might consider using them in the future to get a large volume of writing out of my students, but to spare me some of the late nights grading. Perhaps a final piece of writing in the students’ portfolio could be an essay about what grade they deserved ion my course and why. This may be a more holistic way for me to take a look at students’ compositional improvements throughout the course of a semester.