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Evaluation vs. Grading in Honors Composition or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Grades and Love Teaching
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Guzy, Annmarie |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | As a professor of composition and technical communication, I have had extensive training for and experience with evaluating student writing. The intellectual work of composition as an academic discipline manifests itself in three areas: rhetorically-based composition theory, empirical research of both qualitative and quantitative natures, and--unlike other disciplines aside from education--the applications of that theory and research to build sound teaching practices. In the pedagogical third of our scholarship, compositionists learn not only to design syllabi and assignments that will meet educational goals for students who will need to argue, research, and write at the postsecondary level, but also to establish criteria and develop techniques for useful evaluation of student performance. As early as the master's level, graduate teaching assistants typically take a course on theory and practice in composition before or during their first semester of teaching. They do not lead laboratory sections or grade papers for a professor; rather, they are fully responsible for teaching at least one composition course, more likely two or more, for their school's freshman writing program. At times, undergraduate students in my technical writing courses, particularly those majoring in hard sciences or engineering, express their surprise that although I have a Ph.D., I continue to grade all their papers myself rather than assigning this seemingly onerous task to a graduate assistant. As a professor, I have indeed supervised graduate students who assisted with my research projects, and I have mentored teaching assistants through their first year of teaching, but I have always personally graded all of the assignments from all of my courses. Why? Because the evaluation of student writing in a composition course is inextricably intertwined with the course goal to improve not only writing features but overall critical thinking and argumentation skills. I am sometimes envious of colleagues both within and outside my department who can use assignments and exams simply to gauge what material a student has retained, whether through demonstrations of facility with formulae, memorization of terminology or dates, or completion of SCANTRON-based multiple-choice exams in which students match quotations and characters to titles of works read throughout the semester. Even with the growth of postsecondary initiatives such as writing across the curriculum and writing to learn, I have found that many colleagues, when faced with the administrative mandate to incorporate a writing assignment into their courses, are unprepared to evaluate the paper for any features beyond accuracy of content and (mis)perceptions of correctness in grammar and punctuation, often falling back on the red scribbles that freshman composition teachers made on their own essays twenty or thirty years ago. Grading undergraduate writing, however, entails far more rigorous work than making arcane, blood-red symbols across every page and then writing some dismissive, arrogant summation that rationalizes the low grade assigned at the end. Evaluation of student writing should not be predicated solely on what the student says but also how she says it; not on how many sources she uses in her research paper but whether she uses them effectively in supporting her argument; not on her advanced vocabulary but whether she uses language innately or relies on the thesaurus function to supply pompous verbiage in a misguided attempt to impress the teacher. In short, thoughtful evaluation of student writing can be an exhausting task. Ideally, this burden of evaluation should be alleviated in the honors composition course; if the students could not write well, they would have been denied admission into the honors course and/or honors program (a good number of writing programs have honors composition courses that exist apart from any honors program, but for the purposes of this essay, I will focus on honors composition courses that serve students from an honors program). … |
| Starting Page | 31 |
| Ending Page | 31 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 8 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=nchcjournal |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
