Grading with an Attitude

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 cliché, 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 when students do pay attention to them. Furthermore, students sometimes misunderstand or are even misled by our comments; for example, some may focus on more frequently marked but often less important surface-level errors rather than on more serious problems with development, tone, and organization. Since we are not available in person to emphasize what we wish to emphasize or to correct any misunderstandings, forcing students to rely primarily on written comments can steer them in the wrong direction.

In short, much of the time we spend carefully explicating problems in our students' writing might be spent watching HBO for all the good it does. This does not mean that providing feedback is useless. Students have a right to know how well they did on a project, and grading probably motivates many students to work harder than they would if they knew their papers would not be graded. But what we want above all is for our students to learn, and most of the learning takes place while they compose their papers.

Murray (1979) does not doubt that we should give students feedback; he questions how we should do it. So how do we make grading and responding more useful? What I have done is to emphasize different tasks. I still spend about the same amount of time on each student and each paper, but instead of handing papers back to students in class, I require them to meet with me for conferences, either one...