Great, now that I've got everyone's attention...
Developing a rubric is something I haven't encountered before. The comp program at my last school was organized in such a way that we were given rubrics (or, more accurately, descriptions of an "A" paper, "B" paper, and so on) which aligned with the four major papers we assigned. As a graduate student, it freed us of the burden to create our own rubric, but left us without much experience as to how to properly construct one.
For the first Formal Assignment, I created a rubric similar to the one I was familiar with. I tried to make my expectations clear, while still allowing room for flexibility. I emphasized things we went over in class (awareness of the rhetorical situation, personal voice, engaging narrative, etc.).
I wonder if grading rubrics are more for the students than for the instructors (Elbow seems to suggest that with his "B" rubric, though I'm not confident enough to adopt his model). At this point I can read a student's paper and determine rather quickly a rough grade estimate. Assigning a grade is almost instinctual, at this point. If anything, the rubric helps me justify the grade I've given, allows the student to look over their paper and see how it holds up, and not leave mail bombs outside my home.
I am thinking about breaking the rubric up a bit and assigning points for certain sections, partly because I'm hoping it will lessen the end-comments load. It seems that for half of the papers require the same feedback, and I always feel inefficient repeating myself at the end of each paper.
I opened your blog wondering how grading rubric effected homes :-P.
ReplyDeleteMy old school also had a grading rubric similar to yours--A Paper, B paper and so on. It was definitely quicker. I broke the rubric I had and changed it into the criteria based one.
I know this discussion was from last week, but I have to say that once I used my "rubric" to grade this first batch of papers, I realized that I am not happy with my method so far. Steve, like you, I mainly got a feel for what type of grade a paper would get and then found myself justifying it with the rubric and points (and I'm not even sure that ended up working out). I'd love a better strategy for this that is faster for me and doesn't leave me worrying about the grades I'm giving my students or them confused by how I assigned points in the end.
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