Grading a Revision: When the Process is Concluded

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Many instructors have difficulty grading "final" essays when they and, perhaps, the student's peers have already responded at length to one or more previous drafts. We believe that, somehow, our expectations should be different, higher maybe, for work that students have had so much "help" in producing. Our expectations may also change about what our final comments should evaluate: How long do we keep talking about process? When do we start grading product?

Especially to first-time process writing instructors, one feeling is very common: the odd and unfamiliar sensation of evaluating and assigning a grade on writing that resonates as a collaborative work. The marks of its collaborative production are all over the work; it is not unusual, in fact, for an instructor to read a sentence or come upon an insight in a student essay that appears in "his own words." Students deserve grades, we believe, on the basis of "their own work"; their grades should reflect the level of work they can do on their own after they leave our classrooms. What, then, to do?

• Avoid excessively prescriptive comments on drafts.

Starting with first things first, it is largely possible to prevent that feeling of rewarding a student unduly by conducting student conferences and providing written responses so that they are helpful and directive but not prescriptive. It is certainly possible to give a student a list of demands that will result in an improved essay reflecting little but the student's ability to carry out your prescriptions. Effective conferences and written responses to drafts give students an insight into the writing process, offering a range of choices and the skills to make those choices. Thus, a successful revision can be seen as the result of increased ability to think and write well, based on your demonstrations of powerful thinking and writing strategies in the context of the earlier draft.

• Accept collaboration as an essential part of the writing process.

Moreover, the nagging feeling of rewarding a student for collaborative work she couldn't do "independently" is dissipated with the recognition that a certain amount of collaboration is necessary to effective writing. None of us would expect that our claims to having authored a conference presentation or journal essay should be undermined by the fact that we share our work with our colleagues or incorporated an editor's comments into our final draft. The value of collaboration should thus underlie our pedagogy: we should neither teach nor expect our students to go it alone. Urging them to conference with us, to participate in peer review, to share their work with friends, and to visit the Writing Center is key to helping them be better writers.

• Reward process and product.

Indeed, comments on the final "product" are important to conclusive evaluation. Students should be held accountable for their mastery over elements of form and content that have been held up as "grading standards"/standards of good writing throughout the semester. Yet, within the broad range of objective criteria for good writing, it is also important to recognize a student's increased abilities as a writer and to reward, to some degree, this improvement. The process-writing approach implicitly assumes that the activity of process writing is part of the course content and that mastery over the process--the ability to revise effectively--must be valued (and reflected in a grade) as we also value mastery over the rules that govern a polished final product. We should feel comfortable, then, moving away from a strictly product-bound final grade to one that also reflects the student's demonstrated ability to participate in the various stages of the writing process and to revise effectively.