Assessing writing

What makes good writing? How can teachers determine what good writing is? Teachers have to assess writing on a student’s writing ability. They should be making their assessments on what they taught their students. Williams says that growth in writing is a slow process. I agree with this statement. Every class will have good, average, and poor writers. Hopefully the average and poor writers will improve throughout the school year. I think the subject matter plays a major role in whether or not the student writes a good paper. If the student is interested in the subject, they will have better papers. If they are not interested in the topic, they will most likely not do as well.

I think rough drafts are important in the writing process. The teacher can make comments on the rough drafts. This will hopefully give the student ideas on how to make improvements to their papers. Peer editing is also a good idea.

Teachers should get together and make come up with a standard grading rubric. They all should grade similarly. One teacher might give a paper an A, while another teacher might give it a C. That is unfair to the student. They think they are doing well because one of their teachers gives them A’s, while another teacher constantly gives them C’s.

An assessment should be measured on what was taught in the class. This means teachers should teach to the test. It isn’t entirely the teacher’s fault when their students don’t do well on the standardized tests. The bigger problem is the social issues. Yes, there are some lazy teachers, but what about the good ones? Some teachers care about their students, and some just do their job.

I am not so sure I agree with holistic scoring. I don’t believe students should grade each other’s papers. This is not fair to the good writers. I will take the advice from other students, but I want my teacher to have the final say in my grade. I always read the comments that my teachers would leave on my papers. I kept them in mind for future papers. An issue that comes up is the paper load. It takes a long time to grade papers that are more than three pages. Teachers should assign shorter papers more often rather than lengthy papers once in a while.