On the good side of that, however, we are trying to be more consistent as an English department. Everyone has heard the story of the student who handed in a paper to one English teacher and got a C, but another English teacher gave it an A, because it was all graded so subjectively. Because of our Professional Learning Community ideals, we are sharing and talking more about what we are grading for and what we should be focusing on. Our hope is that it will make us a little more consistent in our grading efforts. Rubrics help that because it makes sure that we are allotting points to areas that we deem important instead of knocking 50% off a student’s grade because they used the wrong “your” consistently throughout a paper.

I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make grades do what you said about the “whole student.” It’s a lot harder to do that in high school. It’s a good idea, however, to focus on improvement instead of simply flat scores. On the other hand, I’d rather have the mechanic who’s fixing my brakes actually know all of the material, not just show the most improvement.

I’ve co-taught a course on “Children and War” many times with an Education professor, and from her I learned all about rubrics. She seemed shocked when I said I assigned grades based on what I “felt” them to be. Yet when we did an experiment — she following her rubric (about ten qualities, each earning a certain number of points) and my subjective assessment — we came out almost the same on every paper. My method, though, takes much less time.

To translate these to letter grades for me comes at the end of the semester. I take into account the “whole student.” Did she show improvement? If so, I might radically discount an early botched exam, feeling she made up for it. Was she present for all classes (again, in college they can skip)? If so, then that may give her the benefit of the doubt in a close call. I tell students that the letter grade number totals (on a normal 90-80 scale) is their base grade. It will not go down, but can go up if a student shows effort and improvement. In that, I try to use grades not just as assessment, but as motivation.

Of course, I can do that stuff in college teaching. I would never want to have to jump through the hoops and requirements that you all in K-12 endure. Bureaucracy sucks.

Good example with the rubric. I grade that way quite often as well.

I often only use a three-point system on rubrics. I tell students, “Think of 3 as ‘A’, 2 as ‘C’ and 1 as ‘F’.” They tend to like the simplicity; I like the relative ease of making and scoring with such a rubric.

I want to differ with you a little. You are compartmentalizing effort and leraning. In most cases one causes the other.

I always have my objective in mind, but I am not always meticulous about writing it down and tracking progress specifically on that object.

In general though, even with such a system, so much relies on the teacher. If we’re going to ask for more specific grading systems, we need more of them, and “better” ones, whatever that means.