When it comes to grading, I tend to prefer impressionistic letter grades to tightly-defined rubrics. The topic comes up at
Crooked Timber today as part of a larger and more general reflection on grading. As those of us who have graded no doubt know, there's often a significant gap between what students expect and what we recognize as possible in giving a grade and the attendant feedback. So I'm in general sympathy with John Holbo, especially
here and
here on the practice of rubric-based grading. The only time I've ever seen it work was in Constitutional Law, where the points on midterms and finals were explicitly tied to mentioning all the relevant issues and relevant sub-parts of the issues. That's a black-and-white thing (though students did still try to argue that their answer should get extra points for holistic reasons not captured in the rubric). On the other hand, I've seen rubrics that strike me as arbitrary. Letter-grading, it seems, is usually more flexible in responding to the various ways a paper might be good or bad (e.g. wrong but interestingly so v. well-polished but uninspired).
3 comments:
Rubrics really do work better for legal writing than most academic writing, I think, because (at least in most cases) there's a defined structure you're supposed to use and points you have to hit. Assigning point values to each might not always be the best way to do it, but it's functional. Using a strict rubric for other types of writing, as you say, is not very helpful (at least for me). Because I grade "notes" - sort of legal writing but sort of not - I guess that explains my students' utter confusion about how they're being evaluated. It's neither mechanical nor completely holistic.
Yeah, this is the problem with writing in which there is no correct answer, which is basically all the writing I will ever expect my students to do. There are papers that fulfill all the mechanical requirements but do rote or uninteresting readings, and there are papers that are a mess but have a page or two of really brilliant, insightful reasoning. I always want to grade the latter type of paper higher, and it seems very defensible, but the kids don't always see it. Then again, I'm not sure I would have when I was their age.
Exactly. Whether or not you have good ideas ultimately distinguishes you more that whether or not you can write correct sentences in organized paragraphs, though both are very important. But it's easy to see a grading style that reflects that as unfair (although really I don't think it is). Hm. I'll be thinking about this as I give my students their round set of feedback this week!
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