The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities PDF
Preview The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities
Page iii The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing Problems and Possibilities Edited by Frances Zak and Christopher C. Weaver STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Page iv Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1998 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246 Production design by David Ford Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data The theory and practice of grading writing: problems and possibilities / edited by Frances Zak, Christopher C. Weaver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0791436691 (hardcover : alk. paper).—ISBN 0791436705 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Theory, etc. 3. English language—Rhetoric—Ability testing. 4. Grading and marking (Students) I. Zak, Frances, 1939– . II. Weaver, Christopher C., 1962– PE1404.T478 1998 808´.042´07—dc21 9720416 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Page v To Pat Belanoff Page vii CONTENTS Foreward ix Pat Belanoff Preface xiii Frances Zak and Christopher C. Weaver Acknowledgments xix Part I. Directions and Misdirections 1 Student Voices 1. The Origins and Evolution of Grading Student Writing: Pedagogical 3 Imperatives and Cultural Anxieties Richard Boyd 2. Direction in the Grading of Writing? What the Literature on the Grading of 17 Writing Does and Doesn't Tell Us Bruce W. Speck and Tammy R. Jones 3. Do We Do What We Say? Contradictions in Composition Teaching and 31 Grading Bruce Maylath Part II. The Power and Authority of Graders 37 Student Voices 4. Construction, Deconstruction, and (Over)Determination: A Foucaultian 39 Analysis of Grades Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot 5. Peter Elbow and the Cynical Subject 53 Michael BernardDonals 6. Differences of Opinion: An Exchange of Views 67 Peter Elbow and Michael BernardDonals Page viii Part III. How Students See Grades as Signifiers 75 Student Voices 7. Grading as a Rhetorical Construct 77 Nick Carbone and Margaret Daisley 8. Resisting Reform: Grading and Social Reproduction in a Secondary 95 Classroom Steven VanderStaay Part IV. Institutional Entanglements 107 Student Voices 9. The Politics of CrossInstitutional Grading: An Adjunct's Dilemma 109 Pauline Uchmanowicz 10. The Politics and Perils of Portfolio Grading 123 Maureen Neal Part V. Imagining Alternatives 139 Student Voices 11. Grading in a ProcessBased Writing Classroom 141 Christopher C. Weaver 12. Gender and Grading: "Immanence" as a Path to "Transcendence?" 151 Irene Papoulis 13. Grade the Learning, Not the Writing 163 Cherryl Smith and Angus Dunstan 14. Changing Grading While Working with Grades 171 Peter Elbow 15. The Conversation Continues: A Dialogue on Grade Inflation 185 Kathleen Blake Yancey, Michael BernardDonals, Margaret Daisley, Maureen Neal, Steven VanderStaay, Nick Carbone, and Brian Huot Works Cited 193 About the Contributors 209 Index 213 Page ix FOREWORD Pat Belanoff Grading is the bottom line. As teachers, we can talk about what we do, why we do what we do, how we assign and respond to writing, how we can collaborate better with others, whether we should have program and department guidelines and syllabi, what might be the value of new designs for assessment—but, at the end, almost all of us have to put letters on grade sheets, "pass" and "fail" or assigned letter grades on portfolios, or conclude our responses with that allpowerful grade. And regardless of how much we may deplore the weight students give to those letters, we cannot get around their power. The paradox here is that, in comparison to the plethora of words about assessment, we do not write much about actual grading. An abundance of articles addressing assessment from a variety of positions have been written over the past years (I myself have contributed to that stream), but grading itself remains (to quote myself) the dirty little thing we do in our closets. I see two reasons for this situation. First, the subject itself is difficult. Is there really a right way to do it? Is it possible to uncover, discover, invent, a grading system which all can accept as flawless? I suspect there are many within the profession who believe there can be such a system and who seek it. I am not one of those. Still, I see no harm (and possibly some good) in such a search provided its proponents do not dictatorially enforce whatever they devise. I recall a graduatestudent discussion of grading at a presemester meeting in graduate school when one of the participants announced that she knew what an "A" was and did not need to Page x collaborate with others in grading. I marveled at the time, but thought that perhaps it was my inexperience that dictated my need for such talk, that I would in time outgrow that need. But I recognize now that both of us were inexperienced; continued experience has taught me—and continues to teach me—how very complex the whole subject is. What I have discovered is that the more experienced a teacher is, the more likely she or he is to acknowledge puzzlement and the way in which it implicates all aspects of the teaching of writing. Let me be even more generalizing and say that thoughtful, committed discussions about grading inevitably encompass all aspects of literacy. The second reason I see for the lack of direct address of grading is that grading represents the most unquestioned power any of us have as teachers. We reserve this space for ourselves. The discipline of English Studies (or whatever name one gives to what used to be called "English") is fragmenting. Interpretive acts are viewed as culturally constructed; we are told that our culture writes us and our interpretations. Our authority as readers of canonical texts is thus undermined, and many of us are not familiar with the marginalized texts our own graduate students study. Our departments control our curriculum, the size of our classes, when we retire, whom we work with, what kinds of external assessment both we and our students are subject to, how much of a raise we get, and who is in our classes. But, unless harassment of some sort can be proven, no one questions our semester grades or our grades on student papers. Do we avoid writing about this area because it represents our final bastion? Our final area of selfdetermination? Our myopia on the subject of grading allows us not to see the relevance of current theory. Many of our fellow practitioners and theorists (I too am guilty here in my unguarded moments) are more than willing to posit the difficulties of text interpretation, the ways in which our cultural environment conditions such interpretations, and—in a larger sense—the ways in which our culture writes us. But, ironically, we hold onto our right to assign student grades as totally selfdetermined creators of text—for, after all, a grade is a text. In truth, I find the discipline a bit hypocritical here—our theories of interpretation are lauded when applied to "high" literary texts and ignored when grading "low" student texts. We no longer believe in the inspired creative writer who waits for the touch of the muse, but we do seem to believe in a muse of grading who inspires us to inscribe the "right'' letter on student papers and portfolios and on semester grade sheets. We cannot continue to enact this split— particularly as our student bodies become more and more diverse and culturally differentiated. The editors of this collection and those who have contributed to it are breaking new ground—devoting themselves to not avoiding the pragmatic aspects of grading and the ways in which those interact with theory. I applaud them all. We need to find ways to validate our doubts about grad Page xi ing, to acknowledge those doubts to the public, and to our colleagues in other fields. And we need to find ways to make it work better for us and for our students since it is not likely to go away. But I applaud this collection for another reason. The increasing growth of the push for standardized testing in this country at all levels of education reflects a deep distrust of local educational systems and teachers. Floating in the air among parents, legislators, educators, and administrators is some largely unexamined faith that if only our nation could create the perfect testing system, learning would improve and the problems of our schools would evaporate. Our faith encourages us to seek a new Eden, a new paradise, in which all students achieve up to and even beyond their potential—and many advocate a national testing system as the path to this Eden. The individual classroom teacher would become a mere supplement to the process. Our discipline cannot claim innocence in this outcome. For too long, we have not been open about the truths uncovered in our research, which include the following fairly unpleasant ideas: all As are not equal, teachers do not agree on grades, teachers do not even agree on what is good writing. We have not shared these ideas with those outside our classrooms largely because we are defensive about them. We must open up channels of communication with all segments of the public and with our colleagues in other disciplines and share with them what we know about grading and assessment—and we must do that without relying on what my grandmother called "highfalutin' language." If we do not begin this conversation, we may well find that standardized assessment has taken over our classroom and made what we do there valuable only as it helps to prepare students for the important judgments which occur outside those classrooms. The longer we refuse to acknowledge to everyone that absolute standards are a myth and timidly avoid acknowledging the variability of our grades, the stronger the push will be for creating a national test. Am I saying that the topic of grading is a complete morass? That we can never agree on anything? Not exactly. But I am saying that the conversation on grading, once entered into, will never end. And this is a good thing for all of us because it guarantees that we will never be content to retreat into our closet and commune with our inner selves as we inscribe those powerful letters on our students' work. The ongoing conversation will keep us all honest, for it is the conversation which is most likely to result in grades useful to our students. We can agree on the purpose served by such conversations and the purposes and value of grades, and we can share that agreement with the public at large. This book opens a discussion, an honest discussion on actual grading—one which all of us involved hope will continue as long as teachers have to make judgments about students' work. Page xiii PREFACE Frances Zak Christopher C. Weaver The two of us spent most of the last two years working on this book on different coasts: Chris in Juneau, Alaska and Fran in Port Jefferson, New York. We communicated by fax, phone, and email, all the while negotiating a four hour time difference. But when we came together in July of 1996 at Fran's kitchen table to put the finishing touches on the manuscript and to write this introduction, we realized something for the first time: when family, friends or colleagues had asked either of us what our book was about, we both found ourselves vaguely embarrassed to tell them we were working on a book about the grading of writing. It was the word "grading" which felt embarrassingly unprofessional, unacademic, unscholarly, and we found ourselves saying the book was about assessment or evaluation of writing— concepts that sounded somehow more academically respectable. Sitting at the kitchen table later and laughing about our common experience, we realized it was important to acknowledge that the reticence we felt personally was also part of the professional landscape in which we work; that the deep ambivalence we were feeling was part of a larger schizophrenia in the field of composition and rhetoric, and about the subject of grading and its connection to the teaching of writing. We think it is worthwhile, then, at the outset, to point out why it is that we have deliberately chosen to use the word "grading" in our title. If this word does not sound "academic" enough for the title of a serious scholarly book, then we hope this fact emphasizes a point we wish to make here: in the scholarly writing of our discipline, we often deliberately avoid this term.
The list of books you might like
