It’s paper grading season! Forecast calls for lighter posting here and across the academic blogosphere with a 60% chance of griping. If you’re in the thick of it right now, feel free to plagiarize my own deathless wisdom on responding to student writing, posted last year.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Old is the New New :: Twitterpunk // Mar 21, 2007 at 8:21 pm
[...] right: those papers I was [...]
2 Chris Lehrich // Mar 22, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Bwa ha ha! No sympathy whatever.
No, actually, I have a lot of sympathy. I also have some advice:
1) Set a stopwatch. Never, ever spend more than 20 minutes grading a paper once you have a fair bit of practice; even at the start, 30 minutes is the max. And that assumes you need to give detailed redlining and writing commentary. If you just have to mark comments and give a grade, cut to 15 minutes tops.
2) The very first time you give an assignment, give a totally random sampling of the papers a very fast skim, about 1-2 minutes per paper tops, just to see what they’re like. That way the grading will work smoothly.
3) Do not take breaks except when you have to. The first two papers in a sitting take longer; after that you’re rolling. If you keep taking breaks after two papers, as so many people do, you will never get up to speed.
4) Do not put them off. Do them right now. Plan your syllabus to give you time.
5) If you follow this plan, let’s suppose a stack of papers comes in Friday. You give a fast skim, have dinner, and do 5 before bed. Saturday you do 10 before lunch, 15+ before dinner, 5-10 before bed. If there are any left, finish them Sunday morning. But you have already done roughly 40 papers. Chances are Sunday is free for other things. If you’re slow and have trouble, it eats up Sunday too, but then it’s done. One weekend, no sweat, and you’re off the hook.
Yes, it can be done. Trust me.
3 Chris Lehrich // Mar 22, 2007 at 11:34 pm
A note on the “responding to student writing” thing. Sure, all true, but come on.
My experience — 5.5 years grading 60 college papers every two weeks, summers off — tells me that most people who talk like this (not you, I hope) think that one should spend an hour per paper. But then reality hits and they can’t get it done.
First priority: GET THEM DONE. Otherwise you begin to resent the papers and the students, and the students begin to get annoyed, and the whole contract between you breaks down. So you have to consider what can be done in 1/2 hour.
And what can be done? Depends on how often you do it. If you do it a lot, you can redline a paper thoroughly and type half to a whole page of single-spaced comments.
Here’s the thing: if you do this, most of the issues about being supportive and so on become irrelevant. Because what students mostly want, and what most of these points are really about, is they want to be taken seriously. They think they want to be treated as adults — they don’t want that, but they think they do. So what you need to do is to take them very seriously indeed.
If you provide extensive commentary and redlining, the students will never have seen anything like it. They have seen 4-5 sentences and the odd mark; sometimes more, but not by much. And if you’re going to hand out a C, for example, if that comes at the bottom of a page of commentary with practical suggestions about how to revise or think differently for the next paper, you will hear no complaints.
A note on assignment structure. My basic principle is this: suppose you took the same assignment, changed the texts to something at your level in your field. Would it be worth your doing? Would it be the kind of thing you really ought to do but never will have time? Then it’s a good assignment. The rest is Mickey Mouse, and the students will pick that up immediately, and resent it.
For example, summary assignments. Do you ever summarize in your writing? (Look at all the writing teaching manuals, which say that summarizing a plot is bad, and students summarize and have to be taught otherwise, blah blah.) Yes, of course you do. What kind of professional scholar doesn’t summarize? But what is the difference between your summaries and theirs? They summarize, by training, to show that they have done the reading; they try to be comprehensive and very shallow. You summarize a piece of something in order to give context to your analysis; you try to cover needed ground and not waste time. So teach them to do your kind of summary. The same principle holds for all assignments.
Beware of pedagogy texts on writing. Almost all of them take for granted a literary model. “Writing across the curriculum” rarely means this: these texts are usually by lit people with a dim conception of what scholarship elsewhere is like.
For example, they love to talk about argument papers, and then all the examples amount to opinion and policy suggestions: whether ski mountains should be held accountable for broken legs. What has this got to do with scholarship? Show them what a real argument is, done by a top-notch but accessible scholar, and they will freak: they have NEVER seen anything like it. But that’s what we really want them to write! It’s ludicrous.
Ask them to do what you do. Ask them to read what you read. Just recognize where they are in their intellectual progress, and try to draw them from their level toward yours. The rest is bunk.
Well, you started it!
4 The Constructivist // Mar 23, 2007 at 1:39 am
Bitch PhD and Acephalous have the funny right now when it comes to student notes to profs….
5 Rob // Mar 27, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Chris:
When you speak on this subject, I take it seriously.
Your advice about the stopwatch and not stopping once you get going is spot on and the bit about taking a break after 2 or 3 papers nails me dead to rights. I’m happy to report I’ve followed your advice, and the big stack is done. Another assignment came in today, and there will be more before term is out, but the big beastly pile has been vanquished.
Getting that uninterrupted Saturday and Sunday took some negotiating with my wife and daughter. I can’t imagine how you manage it, but then I’ve long been in awe of your work habits.
6 Rob // Mar 27, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Chris (again): Thanks for the comments on the Responding to Student Writing handout. I actually think you and I are in agreement on most points. I (in writing to an audience of fresh-faced graduate TAs) just put a bit more sugar-coating on it than you do (as a steely-eyed veteran of the Expos trenches).
But I agree: The importance of assignment design, check. The pointlessness of Mickey Mouse assignments, check. I’ve never seen one of these ski mountain/broken legs assignments you mention, but I get the point. And the number one point IS taking the student seriously. That means not giving them ridiculous time-filling assignments, that means (imho) not claiming the course is about history but spending 90% of your time correcting their spelling, that means responding to their ideas the way you respond to real scholarship. And you’re right, when you do all that, too many students have never seen anything like it.
(One point on which we differ: I DID end up spending about an hour on each paper, but then I had 30 to do, not 60, and they were 25-30 page research papers by 4th year history majors, and I don’t do this every 2 weeks. I envy you many things but that ain’t one of them.)
7 Chris Lehrich // Mar 28, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Rob,
I think you’re quite right on pretty much all of this. If you want to know what I’m referring to about the pointless assignments and such, read some of the teacher manuals that come with writing handbooks for college students. Actually, don’t — they’re horrible — but if you see them you’ll understand why I respond sharply to sugar-coating.
I think you’re probably right to spend an hour on assignments such as you describe, but there is one concern worth taking into account: utility. Given when in the semester this was posted (I think), presumably this wasn’t the last assignment. With very last assignments, I find that it’s worth asking whether students want comments. You have to do this strategically, though.
Here’s how I do it. Basically, in order to file your grades on time, I have to get all the papers graded in a ridiculously short span. So I just read through twice, think deeply, and write a grade. So when I file your grade, I haven’t written comments; it’s based on a deep reading, but I haven’t explicated that reading. Now IF you want further comments, AFTER the grade is filed, email me (or send a note, or whatever). I will then write comments and do the whole production. That way, if you don’t actually care, I won’t know until after your grade is filed, so you know I have no axe to grind on your grade. If you want comments, I’d love to give them; if you don’t, I don’t want to waste your time or mine, and I will be totally frank with you, I don’t really care one way or another — I am not offended if you don’t want comments. You’re finishing the degree, you’re done with college, you never want to hear my yapping again, fine. Okay? But if you want comments, then AFTER the grades are filed, send me email.
I find that this cuts the number of comments to write by about 50% — more, if it’s just a writing class, because MOST students don’t care about the topic, and only want comments if they find my comments useful in a specific way. You might get 75%, it being a senior history seminar, but you won’t get 100%, I promise.
A little trick for you. Isn’t that neat? And if you can’t get your department to pay for mailing the comments, ask the students to provide a stamped, self-addressed envelope if they do want comments. I gave that one up, and just do it by email as a lengthy attachment, but whatever. Just some ideas.
You’d be sad, though. This semester, I have a grand total of 90 papers to grade, with no revisions. Isn’t that cool? They come in, I turn them around, and then I have time off. (Actually I don’t, because it’s all new preps and all lecture, but next time I do these things it will be minimal prep and no grading, and then let’s see about doing some research!)
Stiff upper lip!
8 Science Grows On Trees // Mar 18, 2009 at 12:22 pm
[...] this month and not exactly loving it. You’d think somebody who can go on at such length about writing pedagogy wouldn’t find the actual doing it such a drag. I did have one assignment this term that was a [...]
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