Grading with an Attitude

Abstract

I have a bad attitude about grading. Actually, I have a bad attitude overall. It’s sad but true. I think that what I do as a teacher is important, but I think that my family and my own interests are even more important. And I have come to see the wisdom of the saying “No one ever put ‘I should have spent more time at the office’ on his tombstone.” It may be a cliche, but we really do get only so many heartbeats. So I try to keep things in perspective and use my time wisely. One of the areas in which my attitude has surfaced is the grading of papers. I used to spend a great deal of time responding to each paper, reading carefully and identifying fully any possible flaw by writing extensive comments in the margins. I would then hand the papers back to my students, hoping that they would read my responses and learn from them. I was very much in tune with the tradition of composition that Edward M. White (1996: 13) critiques, hoping that “an individual personal response will lead a student to revision or, more likely, to better work on the next paper.” I have come to realize that, for the most part, I was wasting my time. In his landmark essay “The Listening Eye,” Donald M. Murray (1979) does writing teachers a great service by sharing his experiences and insights on the subjects of grading and student-teacher conferences. I suspect that Murray is right when he suggests that most students read our comments only to learn what grades they have received and, briefly, why. Once their curiosity has been sated, they seldom use their papers as tools for improving either their writing or their understanding of the subjects on which they have written. Unless revision is required, it is highly unlikely that they will work through their errors, learning by producing improved versions of their papers. How often, after all, do we go back to a conference paper that we have written and work on it if we are not trying to prepare it for publication (or another conference)? There are other reasons that providing feedback to students through written comments is often a waste of time. According to a study by Nancy Sommers (1999), the time-consuming nature of grading forces many teachers to rely on generalities, such as “Pay attention to your reader” or “Avoid passive voice.” Such comments are so vague that they have only limited usefulness even