The document critiques traditional grading practices, highlighting their negative impact on student motivation and learning, suggesting that grades often lead to anxiety and undermine the teaching-learning relationship. It presents student voices expressing that feedback and self-driven learning are more effective than grades, allowing for greater enjoyment and improvement in writing. A case study of a student, Reagan, illustrates a positive shift in attitude towards writing when not subjected to grading, emphasizing growth through constructive feedback.

1. Evaluating
Student
Writing
Across the
Curriculum

2. Freewrite
• Why do we grade assignments?
• Why do we give quarter grades?

3. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They aren’t trustworthy
• They don’t have clear meaning
• They don’t give students feedback
about what they did well or badly
• Figuring out grades is difficult, and
the task often makes us anxious
because fairness is so hard to
achieve

4. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They undermine the teaching-and-learning
situation in the following ways:
– They lead many students to work more for
the sake of the grade than for learning

5. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They undermine the teaching-and-learning
situation in the following ways:
– They lead to an adversarial atmosphere;
students often resent or even fight us about
grades; many students no longer feel the
teacher as ally in the learning process and
try to hide what they don’t understand

6. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They undermine the teaching-and-learning
situation in the following ways:
– They force us to write comments to justify
our grade—yet these comments are often
not the ones we want to write to help the
student write better

7. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They undermine the teaching-and-learning
situation in the following ways:
– They lead to a competitive atmosphere
among students themselves.

8. Elbow’s Beefs with Grading
• They undermine the teaching-and-learning
situation in the following ways:
– They give too much encouragement to
those students who score high—making
them too apt to think they are already fine-and
too little encouragement to those
students who do badly

9. Voices from Students
Mary Polly
Brian Kate

10. Voices from Students
“Jennifer”

11. Voices from Students
“Neo”

12. My Research Project
• Do you work harder or less hard
without grades? Do you think
harder or less hard? Do you learn
more or less?
• 100% work/think/learn
“harder” or “the same”

13. My Research Project
• “I think I learn more and can enjoy
it more”
• “I work the same…but I work for
myself instead of for the teacher.”
• “I work harder because I’m not as
stressed [and can] open up more”
• “I think you work harder without
grades but you learn like 3 times as
much.”

14. My Research Project
How do you know how well you’re
doing on an assignment or in the class?
• “Verbal feedback”
• “He lets you know.”
• “You just do.”
• “You compliment us.”
• “Hunley will tell you how good your
papers are or not.”

15. My Research Project
How do you know if you’re improving
or not?
• “Well, if I didn’t approve of my last
paper than I will work harder on my
next paper.”
• “…by talking about my work.”
• “Because I can go even farther than I
[have] ever gone and I know that my
writing is better.”
• “Because of feedback, and you tell us
[to] straighten up.”

16. A Student’s Journey: Reagan
1. Do you consider yourself a good writer?
Why or why not?
2. What kinds of writing do you most like to
do? What kinds do you least like to do? Why?
3. What about writing is hardest for you?
What is easiest?
4. How do you feel about sharing your writing
(both drafts and finished work) with others?
5. How would you most like to improve as a
writer?

17. A Student’s Journey: Reagan
1. I do not consider myself a good writer. I can
never think of what to write about. Also, it
doesn’t flow very well, I think.
2. I really don’t like writing at all. It just not
fun to me.
3. The hardest things in writing for me are
thinking of what to write and how to put it.
4. I do not like sharing my writing at all. I
don’t know why, I just don’t.
5. I would like to improve at thinking about
what to write about.

18. Reagan’s Portfolio Reflection
“When I was flipping through my
portfolio, I noticed a big change in my
writing…. I became less and less afraid
of writing my opinion on things. I
didn’t hold back like I used to. I was
able to write freely without being
criticized.
“Also, during this year I discovered that I
could write. I hadn’t written
something in forever and when I did, I
was surprised. I did better than I
thought I ever could write, ever.”

19. Reagan’s Grading Questionnaire
• Did you miss having grades? No…when
I did get grades I would usually score
low. All the low grades I got would
make me hate writing!
• How did you know how well you did on
each paper? By the feedback he would
give us on his comments sheet. It
would always be constructive
criticism.
• How did you track your progress? By
reviewing my previous writings. I
would look to see the difference.

20. Reagan’s Grading Questionnaire
• How would your work habits have
been different if I had graded all
your work? I probably would have
not written as much as I did. I
would have been conscience of my
writing.

21. Authenticity and Intrinsic Motivation

22. Thank you.