Grading

[PACI Dominique]

I took for granted that grading was a boring process you just had to go through. Do you agree?
Do you do written tests? What is the proportion taken by the work in class and at home?
What are your priorities when grading? How do you go about it?
This could rescue my students and myself from a very tidious job...

[Beatriz Lupiano]

Hi Dominique

I don't need to do a lot of grading at the moment and perhaps that's why I don't see it as a boring process, but I understand that if takes up a lot of teaching time it could at least get quite frustrating.

I've prepared students for international exams like FCE and CAE and that's when I 've had to do some grading. As the students will be graded "for real" by external examiners, I try to stick to the guidelines provided by Cambridge as closely as possible and usually prefer to err on the side of caution. I read the texts a couple of times first just as a general reader would, and then start going through the different criteria and how I think the text fulfills them (eg content: relevant, fully developed. Register and format: appropriate and consistent).

Even if you're not following the criteria set up by an external body, I find it very helpful to set one up for yourself reflecting your priorities and taking into account what kind of course you're assessing.

Perhaps one of the things that helps take the boring edge off grading for me is the fact that I enjoy using the texts as an opportunity for giving students different kind of feedback as well: sometimes explaining a grammar point, or adding suggestions to expressions they've used which are correct (and I make that perfectly clear) but that will help them expand their range of expression, and aslo taking into account a discourse perspective: they're writing text-types that exist in real life and a lot more than structural and lexical niceties go into that, especially as from post-FCE level. So I try to drae attention to ways in which they could enhance certain effects by varying the organisation of information within and across paragraphs and sometimes within sentences as well. For this part I talk to them first and explain my approach, otherwise they tend to panic and think they've got it all wrong!

Hope this helps.
Beatriz