Grading or Assessing?
Thinking about this article, I intentionally decided to use the word “grading” instead of “assessing”. If you are using an approach to writing instruction that I describe in this blog, you are constantly assessing. More than that, you are teaching your students to assess, and to bring that assessment into revising and editing.
But that’s different from grading, isn’t it? Report cards are due in a few weeks, and you have a stack of paragraphs or essays to which you have to assign a hard and fast letter grade or percentage.
Grading writing is a challenge. It’s time-consuming. And no matter how hard you try to be objective, there’s always a subjective element. And what about communicating progress to parents and students? Or even harder, explaining your instruction and grading to a parent who wants to know why their child doesn’t get all A’s?
Rubrics: The Go-to Scoring Tool for Writing
This is part one of two articles on grading writing. With the right tools, and some practice, this task can go more quickly for you, and provide students and parents with useful information.
Writing is often scored using a rubric. This scoring tool is typically a chart, with criteria listed across the top and scores down the side (or vice versa), like this:
| Organization and Focus | Development | Sentence Structure and Clarity | Vocabulary and Language Use | Grammar and Mechanics | |
| Excellent | |||||
| Good | |||||
| Average | |||||
| Poor | |||||
| No evidence |
Choosing a Useful Rubric
Whether you use a rubric provided by your district, or find it from another source, it’s important that the rubrics you use:
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- Accurately identify what is being assessed (the categories across the top in the example above).
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- Base the categories (across the top) on your standards. That way, you’ll have a match between what you teach and what you grade.
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- Have cells that define levels that are clearly distinct from each other. Try to avoid rubrics that use words like “sometimes, occasionally, often” that are too nebulous to be helpful.
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- Have 5 grading levels to match the number of letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) or the number of percentage levels (90-100, 80-90, 70-80, 60-70, below 60) that you’re likely to use in grading.
See the next article on grading for specific examples on how to use a rubric to assign grades.
For narrative writing rubrics designed for grades 3-5 and 6-8, based on the Common Core Standards, see my Teachers Pay Teachers store.