Grading Student Writing-Pro or Con?

"It appeared they did not even read my carefully phrased comments, but simply scanned for the grade and acted emotionally."

~Stephanie Wilder, "Pruning Too Early: The Thorny Issue of Grading Student Writing"

Whether for or against grading, it is a necessity for public school teachers to use grades to evaluate student progress.  This becomes a slippery slope when evaluating writing.  Unlike factual recall or mathematical equations where right and wrong is clear, writing is a craft.  If you threw some of the world's greatest painters into an elementary school art class, they'd probably fall below proficient on the District rubric.  Those "failures" have their fans to counteract their critics.  

The same can be said for student writers.  Who am I to tell a student who invested time and energy into a piece that it's no good?  I'm just another critic--and for every one of me, there's a fan (namely, the author themselves).  In the article quoted above, Stephanie Wilder makes an argument for removing grades from student writing.  Her experiment yielded students putting more effort into their writing than ever before.

I've tried this on several occasions in my own classroom.  True, I still needed to attach a grade at the end, but my experiment allowed the students to feel more like a writer.  Less need for perfection the first time.

Whenever a new writing piece began, I facilitated the general expectations of the assignment and all the steps of the drafting process.  After first draft, I submitted to them my thorough comments.  Those who desired a preliminary grade received one.  For the remainder of the quarter, students had the opportunity to continue making changes, handing the drafts back to me, and receiving more feedback.  At the end of the quarter, all writing pieces were due, and I graded them based on the final product.  

True, this process created more work for me, but the payoff of students understanding the value of the writing process made the work worth it.  Some may argue my additional comments throughout the quarter inflated grades.  Do the comments of our editors improve the value of our work?  Absolutely!  Do they inflate the value of our work without justification? Absolutely not!

What's your opinion on grading student writing?  Are you pro or con?  What strategies have you used?

~Scott Heydt

"Live, Learn, Teach"

www.scotthbooks.com

http://scotthbooks.blogspot.com

References:

Wilder, S. (Fall, 1997).  Pruning too early: The thorny issue of grading student writing.  The Quarterly, 19, 4.  Retrieved May 22, 2009 from the World Wide Web at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/881