Writing Rubric Generator
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How to Grade a Writing Assignment
Grading student writing is tough due to the different creativity levels of students. Besides that, grading lengthy texts without set standards can also pose challenges. Hence, as a teacher, you must try developing set criteria to ease their load without jeopardizing students' learning.
To grade writing assignments efficiently, here are a few steps that you can take.
Design a Rubric
Designing a rubric can be time-consuming initially but save you hours in the long run. You can find rubrics online as well and tailor them to your assignment's requirements.
To design a rubric for grading writing assignments, you must decide the criteria of evaluation:
Objectives of Assignment
You must communicate the learning objectives of the writing task to students and grade them on a basis. The question to ask here is, "Does the student's writing meet the learning objectives?"
Structured Writing
A write-up becomes weak when it lacks a proper structure. The structure depends mainly on the outline designed in the initial planning. Therefore, you must grade the write-ups based on the organization of the content.
Proper Grammar Usage
Errors in subject-verb agreement weaken the writing and should be focused on when grading write-ups. These criteria will also mark students on their spelling, punctuation, and sentence structures. You must also look for superfluous sentences students often write to meet the word count, lowering the quality of the write-up.
Tone and Voice
Each type of writing has a different tone and voice, which students must keep in mind. For instance, the author must be persuasive in a persuasive essay, whereas the author's purpose for an expository essay is simply informing; there's no need for a persuasive style in such writings. You must evaluate whether your students have clearly understood their purpose and set their tone accordingly.
Timely Submission
Appreciating students for timely submitting their assignments will also encourage them to be proactive in the future. Therefore, grading them on these criteria would be a good idea. Since students know their teacher will mark them on it, they can discuss it with their teacher prior in case of late submission.
Peer Review
Another effective and engaging way of grading writing is by peer review. Students can exchange their writing with their partners and grade each other based on the set criteria in the rubric. Since students would already have a rubric for self-assessing their work before submitting it, they can use it to review their peer's work.
This strategy would promote peer learning and allow students to get gentle feedback that they will likely remember for improvement.
Class Presentation and Combined Feedback
Instead of going through each student's write-up, you can also arrange a class presentation and ask each student to read their write-up aloud. This strategy will allow students to listen, learn and constructively criticize each other's work for improvement. It'd also assist you in giving combined feedback so that everybody can learn the same thing, which isn't possible in individual feedback.
Conclusion
Grading student writing is a challenging task that can be made easier with the help of pre-designed rubrics and teaching strategies such as peer review. Ensure that your students are all graded on the same criteria with the help of rubrics that'd save you time and effort. Giving feedback to the whole class combined can also aid students in learning from each other's mistakes.