Responding to and Evaluating Student Work

Two of the most challenging tasks you will face as an instructor new to our program are those of responding to and evaluating student work. It will help, however, if you do two things. First, understand the distinction between responding to and evaluating student writing; and second, work to develop a particular mindset toward students, their writing and your role as a writing instructor.

Response vs. Evaluation
Responding to and evaluating student writing are related processes with the same audience, but different purposes. Responding to student work involves communicating with student writers in an effort to help them improve their writing. Evaluating student work involved communicating with student writers in an effort to help them understand how a given piece (or body) of writing scrutinized at a given moment in time measures up to the grading standards established by the English department at Illinois State University. Both your responses to and your evaluations of student texts will be better informed and more helpful if you can keep a few basic principles in mind.

First, remember that we are all developing writers. A quick perusal of your own writing over the years will show that, even though you may always have been considered a strong writer, your writing has continued to improve over time. Similarly, a close look at the bodies of work produced by even the best professional writers will show that they, too, generally improve as they mature. (Consider how much more highly regarded Huckleberry Finn is than Tom Sawyer--and Mark Twain wasn't a bad writer when he produced Tom Sawyer! If you are a developing writer, and Mark Twain was a developing writer, then certainly your students deserve to be viewed as developing writers as well.)

Second, remember that all of the student writing you will see in English 101 should be considered "work in progress." Master writers rarely--if ever--feel that any single piece of work is perfect. William Butler Yeats used to continue to revise his poems even after they had been published. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote to his editor to ask whether a book, once in print, really needed to be considered "finished." When we say that English 101 employs a "process approach" to the teaching of writing, we are not just paying lip service. We are very serious about this philosophy, and you and your students should be too.

This brings us to the third point: you, as instructor, can play an important role in your students' development by playing a role in their writing processes. Basically we are asking that, as you read student work, you emulate the intended audience and respond accordingly. Generally speaking, writing in English 101 should be directed at an audience that is "well-read and knowledgeable" (see "Portfolio Grading Standards" in the Course Guide). As the instructor, you can give voice to this audience. This requires you to do more than simply mark grammatical errors. Instead, you must truly engage with the text and frame your comments as those of an interested reader. (For examples of these kinds of comments, see the Mercury Reader.)

Evaluating Student Work
Now, even though writing is a process and even though individual texts rarely, if ever, achieve perfection, there comes a time when the writer must pause in the process and subject the text to public scrutiny and evaluation. Just as the work of published authors eventually receives reviews, the work of student writers eventually receives grades.
Evaluating student work is most instructors' least favorite part of the job. It is, however, a necessary evil. Eventually you as an instructor are going to be asked to assign course grades certifying that particular students have achieved particular goals to particular degrees. This is an important part of your job. In the very broadest sense, the extent to which Illinois State University is able to maintain its credibility with the public depends at least in part upon the validity of the grades you assign. (Heavy, huh?)

Some of your students are going to question whether or not you, as a writing instructor, can actually assign valid grades. They are going to view the evaluation of writing as a purely subjective task, highly dependent upon whether or not you personally "like" the text--or even whether or not you personally "like" the student. Part of your job is to help your students understand that, in this program at least, whether or not an instructor "likes" a particular text or a particular student is not an evaluation issue. In this program, all work is evaluated by the same criteria--the grading standards published in the Course Guide. The harder you work during the semester to help your students understand what those grading standards are, what they mean, and how they apply to each evaluated text, the less likely you are to have to deal with student grade challenges at the end of the semester.