Actionable feedback: improving students' learning AND making your work easier

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A while back, I did a really stupid thing. I estimated just how much writing I have to grade in any given semester. That's a calculation no writing instructor should ever do. It's depressing and discouraging. I found out that, in a typical semester, I have somewhere around 370,000 words to grade. That works out to 1,480 double-spaced pages. Granted, that's spread out over the entire semester. Nevertheless, that still means I'm grading somewhere around 370 double-spaced pages for every assignment. And that's only if I'm not teaching overload sections!

One good thing did come out of these depressing calculations. I may teach writing, but my background is in science, and these hard numbers forced me to reevaluate how I was grading in a way no narrative argument could. Up to that point, I was grading in what I call copyeditor mode, marking every mechanical error, highlighting every awkward phrase, and commenting on every structural or logical weakness--in every paper. That simply wasn't sustainable.

Worse, as I researched ways to make grading easier for me, I learned that copyediting is terrible pedagogy. When I was an undergraduate, I valued copyediting of my work. I scrutinized every red mark on my paper and reveled when subsequent assignments came back with less "blood." The people who go on to become professors, though, often aren't like other students. We're often freaks, "deviants" in statistical terms. The bulk of students, I've found, don't learn much, if anything, from copyedited papers.

For one, students struggle to extrapolate from specific mistakes to general rules. Just because I mark every instance of a student making comma errors between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses doesn't mean they learn how to differentiate between the two or intuit the rules of correct comma usage--especially when I'm also marking other kinds of comma errors in the same paper! Too many corrections, then, just overwhelm students, leaving them baffled as to how to improve their performance on future assignments.

It was hard to let go of copyediting, but I finally took the plunge, and I've never regretted the decision. Now, I have teaching assistants provide feedback on student rough drafts in the form of specific goals each student should work on for their final draft. I instruct them to leave no more than three goals for each paper. Depending on the goal, they may mark one or two examples from the rough draft to help students understand specifically what they need to work on, but I ask them not to copyedit.

Students use their TA's feedback (along with feedback from their peers) to make revisions before turning in their final draft to me to be graded. As part of the final draft, I require students to include the goals the TA left for them on their rough draft. Rather than copyediting, then, I grade strictly from a rubric. One of the rubric items is whether or not the student adequately addressed the TA's goals.

I was reluctant to use this approach. I was deeply skeptical that students would improve their writing without copyediting their work, and I felt guilty for not taking the time to provide them with that level of detailed feedback. My first surprise, then, was that students didn't complain about my grading--at all. At the end of the day, I'd been beating myself up for not providing comments that, as far as I can tell, no one was reading anyway.

My much bigger surprise was that students actually did improve their writing under this system. Indeed, they seem to be doing better now than they were before I made these changes. I haven't done a rigorous statistical analysis to validate this impression, and I've made so many other changes to my courses that it would be difficult to pinpoint my grading style as causal in any case, but assignment averages are consistently 4-5 points higher than when I was copyediting. I consider that a huge win!

Of course, I'm never done tinkering with my courses. Moving forward, I'd like to streamline my grading rubrics. Right now, each rubric lists specific areas I want to emphasize, with point values assigned to each based on whether they meet expectations, almost meet expectations, partially meet expectations, or do not meet expectations. While this generates a reasonable numerical grade, I'm considering scrapping it altogether.

Part of this is motivated by the fact that my course is listed as pass/fail. It's not terribly important, then, for each paper to receive a numerical grade. What matters is whether students are meeting expectations or not. Also, when professional writers submit articles, editors don't return graded responses. It seems, then, that a better way to prepare students for professional writing would be to implement an "accept" or "revise and resubmit" grading structure. If I do that, then my rubrics can simply be a tally sheet in which I list each paper's strengths and weaknesses without worrying about more nuanced distinctions that create an illusion of far more precision than is warranted. These are all new ideas so I haven't worked out exactly how I want to structure this revised system, but I'm hoping to have it worked out in time for spring classes.