(Not)grading writing
An end-of-semester reflection, Part 1
I mentioned, earlier this semester, that I felt conflicted about alternative grading: that I was glad I’d decided to try it in my course this spring, but also that I had some misgivings (and a fair amount of guilt) about deciding to do so. That I felt (as a graduate student) newly conscious of both the good and bad of rubrics assigned to my own writing.
The semester ended two weeks ago, and I still feel conflicted.
This probably shouldn’t surprise me. I am, more often than not, in the middle of any given debate. I used to wonder if this meant I was spineless, unwilling to take a stance. If it came from a misplaced desire to placate both sides.
But I’ve come to accept that the middle ground is both a genuine space to occupy and one that comes with its own baggage. While I might not have the sort of strong, fundamental disagreement that comes from holding a view farther on one side or the other, I also rarely make anyone happy.
It also shouldn’t surprise me because, in teaching a research course, I talked with students about the fact that research papers often end with a discussion of limitations and a call for further research. So of course I can’t help but be aware of the limitations of my little experiment in alternative grading, given that it concerned a single semester, a single class, a single teacher.
On the other hand, these aren’t so much limitations as the scope of the experiment in the first place, which was not about whether this type of grading works in general, but whether it works in a very particular context: Does it work in a course where I am the teacher explaining it and giving feedback? Does it work in the type of courses I teach (that is, at the moment anyway, writing courses)? Does it work with the particular students in my class, at the university where I’m teaching, with the (tiny, tiny) teaching load I have as a graduate student?
As before, I’ll share what seems to have worked first, before getting into what did not go as well as I hoped. I have some continued questions about next year that I’ll get to at some point as well.
But, for now, some of the good things (with a few qualifiers).
Risk-taking
I surveyed my students at the end of the semester and asked them a series of questions on how contract-grading affected (or didn’t affect) their writing, including how grades impacted their willingness to take risks in their writing.1
I asked them first about their prior experiences with grades in writing courses and whether or not grades affected the risks they took in writing. By and large, they stated that it did. Most said that worries about getting a poor grade made them write to conform to the instructor’s expectations, that they were unwilling to take a risk because if it didn’t pay off, they’d be left with a low score. One student also noted that receiving high grades made them complacent, stating, “If my grade is higher, I'm less likely to take risks because I don't want to put my grade in jeopardy by accidentally doing something the wrong way.”
Their responses for WRIT 1120, the course I taught this semester using contract-grading, were markedly different:
I, regretably, did not ask them to reflect more on this specific question in the survey, but in their final comments, one of the students noted that contract-grading “allowed me to be creative, and write about what I wanted to write about.” I would guess that this, along with a decreased fear about receiving a low grade on an individual assignment, likely contributed to the willingness to take risks.
On the other hand, one student noted “if I can do the minimum to receive a good grade then personally I don't see a point in giving extra effort.” This speaks to both risk-taking and revision (more on that below), and it seems like a possible reason for any dampening effect contract-grading might have on students taking risks. Contract-grading (at least the version that I used) doesn’t penalize students for taking risks—but it also doesn’t incentivize it. Students were freed to take more risks—but they had to want to do so in the first place.
It’s also tempting to chalk up any of the positive effects to contract-grading itself, but one of the student’s responses makes me hesitate to explain it as such. They said that contract-grading itself didn’t have much of an effect: “I think talking about taking more risks is what would push me to take risks.”
I’m not sure if this student thinks we did so in WRIT 1120—but I would say that we did. At least, it’s something I mentioned in class on multiple occassions. In my conferences with students, my default response to the question “Should I write it like this?” was “Try it. See if it works.” All of which makes me wonder if the students’ reflections on risk are less about the grading system itself and more about any context where risk is explicitly valued and discussed.
My takeaway: Contract-grading is one way to create a space for risk-taking, which students can take advantage of or not. It’s a starting point for cultivating experimentation and risk-taking by not penalizing for it.
But I’m curious, moving forward, about assignments and assessments that more actively reward taking risks in writing. Wendy Bishop, a composition instructor, assigns her students five essays over the course of the semester, with the fifth essay being a “radical revision — a reworking of essay 1, 2, or 3 that is so experimental for the writer that it may fail” (111).2 This essay, along with the others, is accompanied by a cover letter in which students explain their choices—for the “radical revision,” the reflection is explicitly on the risks the student chose to take.
I like this because it doesn’t just encourage risk-taking; it makes risk-taking the very focus of writing. It doesn’t just allow failure; it rewards it. It sends a clear message about writing and creativity: that the very nature of writing is experimentation, and the nature of experiments is to fail repeatedly before they succeed; that success is always nebulous when it comes to creative forms anyway.
Revision
Students also indicated that they spent more time and/or effort revising their writing:
This one is a bit more puzzling to me, since students indicated, earlier in the survey, that grades were one of their main reasons for revising in previous classes. Many said that a low grade would prompt them to revise more, while a good grade made them less motivated to revise. Others said that the grade had no impact at all: that they were intrinsically motivated to make their paper better and would revise regardless of the grade.
My best guess is that the lack of grades in WRIT 1120 meant that this kind of calculation was not possible to make. The students who would already be inclined to revise still revised; the ones who might have been complacent with a high grade may have felt less so in the absence of an “A” on their draft. One of the requirements for the final draft was “substantive revisions,” so no matter where the paper started, students were encouraged to look for areas to improve. Regardless of the strength of their paper, students had feedback on areas that could be expanded, clarified, or restructured, mostly in the form of questions I wrote in the margins while I was reading
But as with the students’ responses regarding risk-taking, I wonder how much of this is actually about the grading system and how much stems from the broader context of the course: Perhaps talking about revision is what had this effect, rather than the presence or lack of grades. Perhaps just the requirement for “substantive revisions” was enough to encourage it.
And I have mixed feelings about the way I communicated the expectations for revision with students. One student said, “In some classes I feel as if I have to make my rough draft intentionally bad in order for my final draft to have been ‘revised enough.’” Obviously making a first draft artificially bad goes against the entire point of requiring revisions. Some of this may have stemmed from the language I used: “Substantive revisions” is a subjective category, and I could see a student worrying that if they started with too strong of a paper, they wouldn’t have room for improvement. We did spent time in class talking about what “substantive revision” meant (changes focused on content, structure, and clarity, rather than merely tidying up punctuation or grammar, which are good edits to make, but don’t get at the heart of the piece), but I could still imagine a student thinking that if their first draft was too good, the only revisions available to them would be smaller mechanical edits.
As both an instructor and a writer, I know this isn’t true: any writing can be improved, regardless of how strong the initial draft is. I have never read a student’s paper that I didn’t think could be substantially revised. I’ve never written such a paper myself. But I can see the student’s logic, as well as how both traditional grading and a grading contract could encourage this kind of “intentionally bad” writing.
My takeaway: Contract-grading that includes revision as part of the expectations encourages students to spend time improving their writing from one draft to the next, regardless of their starting point. But the wording and conversation around this is important if it’s going to encourage genuine growth, not just an artificial performance of it.
I’m curious if pairing discussions of revision with risk-taking would help encourage students to think of revision differently. Substantive revision could include a risk that ends up making the paper worse, rather than better, but that genuinely attempts to structure it more effectively. Or perhaps having more concrete examples of revisions to already-strong writing,could better show the possibilities available to students. In any case, this is certainly something I’ll continue thinking about in future courses.
Growth and feedback
This is not from the survey—this is my own addendum.
The semester ended with a final conference between each student and me. I read their final paper, made some marginal comments, and then sat down with each of them to discuss the changes they’d made from the working draft to the polished draft. We reviewed the semester as a whole and discussed the final grade.
Regardless of what I do with grading in the future, this final conference is something I absolutely want to keep.
For some students, we spent the time working through a part of the paper that was still giving them trouble, talking about how they could reorganize or clarify if they were to continue working on it.
For other students, we talked about major changes they made from one draft to the next—why they’d made these choices and what effect those choices had.
I spent less time writing comments I knew most students wouldn’t read (given that this was the final draft of the final paper) and more time thinking about how they’d grown from one draft to the next and what kind of growth I could still encourage in this final meeting.
I wish I’d asked students about this on the survey—I will ask them in future classes—but from a teacher perspective, these last conferences were my favorite. This probably took just as long as grading the papers would have, but the time felt both more enjoyable and more productive. Each conference was 20 minutes, but I spent less time reading the paper beforehand than I would have if I were grading and commenting extensively. I also had students highlight and comment on their revisions, which shortened the reading time too. And I didn’t dread these conferences in the way I dread grading, which always feels pressure-filled and arduous.
Ending with a conversation felt more in keeping with what writing is in the first place: an ongoing effort to communicate something, a series of attempts and failures and realizations of this effort, a meeting of the writer and reader in that ambiguous space language provides.
Students took the survey anonymously. The ones who are quoted or paraphrased here gave me permission to do so. Twenty-two of my twenty-four students responded.
Bishop, Wendy. “Contracts, Radical Revision, Portfolios, and the Risks of Writing.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, edited by Anna Leahy. Multilingual Matters, 2005, pp. 109-120.