For many years, educators have been using letter or number grades to assess students works. That number or letter can make or break your grade, but those grades aren’t necessarily true evaluations of a students work. Those grades could affect students because colleges might not accept them because of those grades, but that doesn’t necessarily make the student dumb.
This girl got a bad grade even though she tried her best and understands.
James, R., Mitchell’s essay, “Grading has Always Made Writing Better” in the book Bad Ideas about Writing is about why grading is not a great way of assessing work. It is a bad ideas because students may feel pressured to do exactly what the teacher wants instead of doing what they think works better. A better way to grade is to maybe not give students zeros on assignments and give them fifties. It is still a failing grade, but it is much easier to recover from. Another way is to give the students a rubric at the beginning of the school year and show them what is expected, that way they know what is coming and if they don’t do what is expected, then it is on them because they’ve known since the first day.
Little boy got a good grade on his work
In the essay, ”Grading has Always Made Writing Better”, James explained how grading and assessing do not mean the same thing. He explained the different by saying that, ”Assessment and grading are not synonymous. Grading is a silent, one-way evaluation, where a teacher assigns a letter, rife with a set of socio-cultural significances, to a piece of student writ- Ing Assessment, on the other hand, provides the opportunity for two kinds of evaluation—formative and summative.” (James, 256).
James had explained earlier how grades don’t make sense to students at times because they can be confusing. A student explained his confusion by saying, “I don’t even understand what the grade means on my paper. The top says something like a B and then all the comments say positive things and then there are all these errors marked. Then the person next to me wrote only half as much as I did and has even more errors marked and he got an A. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.” (James, 256). This can confuse students because if two students do the same thing but one gets a higher grade, then how was the grading done?
Students comparing grades
His conclusion was that grading is not the best way to go about things because it isn’t always fair. A resource that he used was “Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.” Edited by Stephen Tchudi.
Tchudis work has a list of alternatives of ways to see a students work in a new light. This way, when you grade work, students why they are receiving a certain grade and it doesn’t look like a teacher just thought their writing was bad in anyway. Sometimes give grades and feedback that seem a bit harsh towards a student, but the student doesn’t always understand why they received it. With these alternatives, such as students evaluating their own work, then they will understand what they could have done differently in order to get a better grade.
Students evaluating their work
Work cited
- James, R., Mitchell. “Grading has Always Made Writing Better.” in Bad Ideas About Writing. Edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, 255-258. Web. https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/
- “Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.” Edited by Stephen Tchudi. March 15, 2011.