Everybody will give you advice on how to write—no one does on how to grade. I graded student papers for 40 years and finally found a method that felt right to me. Grading this way made me a better composition teacher and my students and me happier people. Since “writing across the curriculum” is pushing many professors into teaching writing, I thought I’d tell my college and university colleagues what I did, in the hope that you can adapt some part of it to your circumstances.
First, I relieved my students of much of the pressure to perform by saying they could revise their papers as often as they wanted and only their highest grade would count. None of this nonsense of “You get one shot. If it’s off-target, too bad.” All published writing is edited, I said—often several times through several revisions. I told my students, “In this course you have the same privilege professional writers do.”
Second, to relax my students even more, I demystified the grading process by admitting that the grades I gave were subjective—my opinion of a particular version of a particular paper. My grade, I said, was exactly like the 7, 9, 4, 10, 6 that judges hold up after an Olympic dive or a figure-skating or gymnastics performance.
I told them a wise Roman once said “In matters of taste, discussion is futile” and thus blocked their begging for higher grades. “I’m not saying my opinion about your paper is right,” I said. “I would never claim that. We don’t know what God thinks good writing is. God hasn’t told us. Even if God had, I don’t think that would stop our liking what we like.
“My opinion is simply my opinion. That’s all I’m paid for: to tell you what I truly, cross-my-heart believe. You’ll soon learn my opinions about writing, and you’ll decide what you think of them. This is a two-way street: teachers judge what students do, and students judge the teacher.
“Now, notice I’ve said teachers judge what students do. We don’t judge students—or we shouldn’t. I try my best not to. I judge the high dive or skating dance you do at a particular time, in a particular paper; and I hold up a card reading A, B, C, whatever. The grade I give has nothing to do with the respect and affection I have for you as a person.
“Why do I have the right to judge what you do? Because the college judges that I have the credentials to do it. How did I get the credentials? I did just what you’re doing: I wrote papers that teachers put grades on. I did this in college and grad school, and when I’d proved to enough teachers that I could write to their satisfaction, I was allowed to write a dissertation. When I finished that to my professors’ satisfaction, I was awarded the doctorate, which is the highest credential in my field.
“This college’s assumption is that by doing all that writing and having it critiqued by teachers I have absorbed the standards of the tribe, so that when I comment on your papers I’ll be saying things other humanities teachers would say, because the subjectivity of my opinions has been sanded down by exposure to the opinions of my elders.
“And maybe this happened. If you gave a paper to me and other teachers in my department, I think we’d probably have many of the same comments on it. But if we didn’t, I wouldn’t be hurt. Because, again, I’m not hired to tell you The Truth—in matters of taste and expression, we don’t know what The Truth is. I’m hired to tell you what I think is true.”
Third, finally, and—I like to believe—most important, I read my students’ papers aloud into a cassette tape recorder, making comments as I went, praising good observations and sentences, suggesting how poor sentences could be reworded, pointing out where the organization was weak and transitions missing (“You’re saying this in the sentence I’ve marked 1 and this in the sentence I’ve marked 2, but you don’t tell us the relation between 1 and 2”), and offering ideas to fix the problems I found.
In short, where I believed my students’ papers could be improved, I collaborated in revising them. I returned the papers and tapes to students and invited them to listen to my comments with all possible patience and charity; talk to me about anything they didn’t understand or seriously disagreed with; and then, if I’d given a grade of lower than A-, revise for a higher grade using and improving on the suggestions I made on the tape.
I believe that my method draws on what is good about the Oxbridge tutorial system. At the elite British universities, students each week read their papers aloud for their dons. Under such scrutiny, writers learn to write clearly and simply because they see their readers’ reaction in their faces. So too, in my system, students can hear when the reader is pleased, puzzled, fascinated, moved, totally at sea.
More important, the students hear that the teacher wants to help them. We all know what happens when students get back papers covered in red ink. They’re affronted, frightened, discouraged. Spoken comments can have a gentle, upbeat, we’re-all-in-this-together tone (“Look how much better the sentence is with the extra words taken out!”). The student gets a tutorial without needing the courage to seek help from the teacher.
To be sure, not all students papers can be improved, because some, to my eyes, don’t say anything of consequence. As I explained in my course syllabus, “If I judge a paper's content to be weak, merely improving its form will generally not raise the grade much; really to be improved, the paper will need to say something else.” The student has to write a different paper. I delivered this opinion, like all others, in a friendly and non-judgmental tone.
I found that most students could find something useful to say, especially if encouraged, as my students were, to write about things—King Lear’s fathering, Edward Weston’s vegetables, crosstown bus behavior—from their own experience and point of view. My syllabus said, “There is no reason for a diligent student not to get a good grade in the course,” and all students willing to rewrite their papers, sometimes three or more times, got an A or A-. They deserved to: they had written a paper that, to my eyes, looked like A work (as it should since I helped write it).
Did my students write better after my course? I like to think so. A few are kind enough to come back and tell me they do. The students left the class having internalized some of my opinions—above all, “use simple diction” and “make each sentence join to the one before it”—whether or not they choose to follow them later.
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I’ve roughed out my plan. Now let me answer some of your objections and questions.
1) Everybody can get a good grade!
Yes, if they have something to say, competent writing skills, and a willingness to work. I’ve taught my students what I had to teach about writing, and they have shown they understand by writing papers that strike me as good. I’m not worried about giving high grades because I remember Maria Montessori said “A teacher is to teach, not to judge,” and by that standard I have done my job.
2) Some students have to work much harder than others!
True. I hope they learn more, too.
3) The process takes too much of the teacher’s time!
This depends. If you’re a conscientious composition critic and write many comments on papers with a general comment paragraph at the end (as I used to do), my method takes less time, because talking is so much quicker than writing. Talking is so fast, in fact, that you make many more comments and suggested revisions on papers that need them than you would in writing. The final comment at the end of the paper is quickly done, because it takes off from what you’ve been saying all along (“As I’ve said, this paper has a very interesting point to make but makes it less forcefully than it can. There is too much vague abstraction, which I’ve pointed out and tried to rectify”).
Further, if a paper was longer than six or seven double-spaced pages, I would often stop reading every word aloud, put the tape on pause, and start it up again when I had something to say (“Lisa, I’m on page 9 where I’ve made the asterisk”). Similarly, if a paper is a revision of a paper that was fairly good to begin with (a B), I didn’t read it aloud until I got to things I wanted to comment on.
Now, it is true that with students who write well you spend time reading papers aloud and making few if any negative comments—but what’s wrong with that? The good students are rewarded by hearing how smoothly their papers read and by your praise. We composition teachers typically don’t spend enough time on the good students: here’s a way to start.
4) Did you read a paper over before reading it aloud on tape?
No. I gave students my first-blush, stammering, delighted, confused reaction to their papers.
5) Who provides the tapes?
The students. They also provide an 8-by-11 envelope to hold the papers and tapes they submit. Because students often forget to buy a tape, I allowed them to hand in a dollar for a tape I supplied (I bought tapes for less than a dollar). I told students that if they preferred me not to read their papers to them on a tape, I would give their papers a written comment at the end and a grade. In a decade only one student chose this option.
6) Does this method make grading fun?
No and yes. I still looked at a pile of papers with dread and began each paper with reluctance. But as soon as I started reading I found something to interest or disappoint me, something I wanted to talk to its writer about—which I immediately did. And by the second page, unless the paper was going to take huge amounts of revisions, I was caught up in the topic and once again delighted about the career I chose in my salad days.
