Ó Don W

This essay first appeared in Exercise Exchange 26 (Fall 1981): 17-20; reprinted in Writing Exercises from Exercise Exchange. Vol. II. Ed. Charles Duke. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1984.

A Grading Contract That Works

LEVEL

Freshman composition.

AUTHOR'S COMMENT

"Is this essay a B- or a C+? Let's see . . . . she got a C+ on the last essay, and this one does seem to be an improvement, if only slightly. I guess a B- is about right, besides, it will encourage her." Almost every composition teacher has agonized in this way during a long session of grading essays. The business of assigning grades to essays is clearly frustrating for teachers and very often debilitating for students, frequently to the point of undermining the goals of a course in composition. On the other hand, most attempts at ungraded or pass/fail composition courses we know about have been considered less than successful. However much we may dislike conventional grading, our students still need "carrots and sticks," and they still need a sense of justice. More importantly, they need to be able to experiment and to make mistakes without fear of devastating penalty. In an attempt partially to resolve these tensions, and at the same time to produce a grading system more congenial to the needs of a composition course, we have devised a "new" contract grading system.

Unlike a quantitative contract grading system based on the number of finished essays (for example, five to be eligible for a C, six for a B, seven for an A), our system is qualitative, designed to encourage a great deal of revision. Also, unlike a contract system wherein the student decides at the beginning of the course which particular grade he or she wants to work towards and then "contracts" with the teacher for that grade, our system allows the student the freedom to decide at any time during the course. A further difference is that the student never has to "contract" with us.

THE APPROACH

Here's the way our system works. In the course of a semester, every student is required to write six deliberative essays. Each essay is evaluated by the instructor and placed into one of the following categories:

"publishable"-A publishable essay is one that makes a clear and perceptive point, is well supported with reasoning and details, is well-organized, is written in a mature and appropriate style, and contains only minor mechanical or spelling errors.

"revisable"-A revisable essay is one that is well-conceived and shows considerable evidence of planning, but which fails to execute successfully in one or more of the areas listed in the definition of "publishable"-that is, in terms of support, organization, style, or mechanics.

"re-write"-A rewrite essay is one that fails in one of the following ways:

is ill-conceived; makes no consistent or useful point;
is poorly constructed and carelessly written; the reader has trouble following the ideas or train of thought;
contains so many errors in sentence structure and usage that the message is troublesome to decipher;
departs from the assignment in an unacceptable way.

After the essay is returned, the student has several options, depending upon the essay's category. If the essay is a "re-write," a specific date is assigned (usually a week later) for re-submission. If the essay is "revisable," the student is free to revise it and to turn it in at any time later in the semester-several times if necessary and feasible. (We stipulate that all revisions must be "good faith" revisions-serious efforts to improve the essay toward the category of "publishable.") The only qualification we add is that during the last two weeks of the course, a student may turn in a maximum of two revised essays; a deluge of papers at the end of a writing course is, of course, a composition teacher's nightmare.

The final grade for the course is determined by the number of revisable and publishable essays the student produced in a course organized around six 600-1000 word essay assignments. Our basic "contract" is as follows:

A four publishable essays and two revisable essays

B two publishable essays and four revisable essays (however, there must be a total of four attempted revisions)

C six revisable (with at least three attempted revisions)

D near fulfillment of the C contract

F serious failure to fulfill the C contract, coupled with lack of effort

We should pause here for a moment to discuss the importance of revision in our system. Since we rely so heavily upon revision, the student needs to be educated in how to revise. Revision is largely a waste of time if a student is only correcting mechanical errors. Therefore, we impress upon our students that a revision must take into account not merely mechanical concerns, but rhetorical ones as well. Organization, argumentative strategy, and audience appeal all have to be considered by the student during a successful revision. In addition, we inform our students that we will not identify every single problem we see in the paper the first time we evaluate it; to do so would place a great burden on the student and might discourage revision. Rather, we try to indicate major problems in the first evaluation and then move to other problems in subsequent revisions. We have found that it is crucial to make these revision policies very clear to students from the beginning of the course, so that they know what a "good faith" revision is.

We feel that this grading system is advantageous in several ways. The primary advantage of our system is that it avoids discouraging students with a low grade from the very beginning of the course. The effect of a D or even a low C on a student's initial essay can be debilitating. In fact, a kind of vicious cycle can result. The student receives a D on the first essay and panics; she see herself forever doomed to the realm of "d-ness," with no real way to improve her writing. Our system, in that it encourages revision and "writing in progress," offers her the chance to learn the nuts and bolts of writing. Moreover, our system offers the psychologically positive opportunity to move from the rewrite to the revisable to the publishable category.

A second advantage is that our system encourages the student to view writing as a process. For too long, composition teachers have functioned too exclusively as evaluators of finished products. We judge the essay, give it its letter grade, and push it back to the student who files it away in a notebook somewhere and immediately forgets the comments we have labored so faithfully to provide. It is here that we lose an important opportunity to help the student become a better writer. It is much better to take that essay, point out major shortcomings, and allow the student to continue developing ideas in a revision. The procedure certainly injects an element of realism. After all, most of us are rarely satisfied with our own final drafts; in fact, we often wish we could get them back after it is too late.

Thirdly, our system offers the teacher a positive alternative to the letter grade syndrome. It may at first appear that our categories are just another way of saying A, B, or C, but such is not the case. The publishable category may be the equivalent of the A, but the revisable category encompasses both the B and the C ranges (and perhaps at times even the high D). The difference between a B and a C is not always very clear in something as subjective as essay evaluation. However, both the B and the C are distinct from the A. Consequently, should not both require revision in order to be considered publishable?

Finally, our system encourages "real-world" writing, and it discourages "writing-to-the-teacher." The implicit role of the teacher is transformed from that of grader to helpful, sympathetic editor. Incidentally, the system facilitates peer discussion of essays, by focusing comments and criticisms toward possible revisions. A basic requirement of our course is that every student have at least one essay reproduced for every member of the class. That essay is then read out loud by the student (or teacher) and is evaluated by the rest of the class. Typically, the comments of the student's classmates are very helpful and point out areas needing revision. Most often the class then categorizes the essay as Publishable, Revisable, or Re-write. This method helps to keep the student focused on real-world writing, where an audience must be considered.

However, we would be less than candid if we did not admit that there are potential problems with our system. The first, as we have already mentioned, is that the student will fail to understand what revision actually means. Therefore, we spend much class time, especially at the beginning of the course, talking about revision. Secondly, there is a good deal of extra grading; and quite frankly, initially this seemed the greatest drawback for many of us. However, we found that frequently the time spent on evaluating the major weaknesses of each revision was no more than we would have spent on doing a minute evaluation of that "final draft." Even so, there is probably more grading required in this system, although most of us feel it is a less agonizing process than before.

A final problem concerns the proper ratio of publishable to revisable essays for the final grade. One result of this grading system is likely to be an increase in the number of high final grades. There may be several explanations for this. The first is that the system worked-that is, that a number of students actually became better writers as a result of learning how to revise. On the other hand, some students achieve their high grades as a result of sheer persistence and hard work. These students still may not be able to produce a publishable essay on the first attempt, but through careful revision they can make it publishable later. Of course the problem with all this is that in most of the other courses they will take later, they will not have this luxury; the essay will have to be handed in on the appointed day, as is.

These difficulties indicate that individual teachers will need to experiment somewhat with our system in order to establish some balance between the goals of giving students encouragement and of maintaining standards. Like any new system of grading, this one will require some getting used to, and it will, no doubt, need some refinements in particular situations; but because of the definite advantages that the system offers over conventional grading, and because student reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, we think it worth recommending.