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(male speaker). Not really.
(Dr. Nilson). Really?
Oh, you're writing just as much on the really good papers.
(male speaker). I want to tell them
what they're doing right and say good job on this and that.
(Dr. Nilson). Yes, okay, that's good,
that's good, yeah, that's good.
But I mean, you don't have to, like, you can praise and you can
say nice things in there, but you don't have to say well,
you really should be restructuring it
so it's more like this and that, and this and that.
Usually you're putting, using a lot more ink.
And those are the students who are the least likely to read
your comments, unfortunately.
Yeah.
(male speaker). I wonder sometimes
if we don't write comments defensively.
(Dr. Nilson). To defend ourselves.
(male speaker). Yeah, that's why
I gave you this grade, and here I've explained why.
(Dr. Nilson). Right.
(male speaker). So thinking we might
preemptively avoid them coming in.
I don't know, I think I do that sometimes.
(Dr. Nilson). We shouldn't have to defend
ourselves the way we have gotten into a pattern of doing.
And if we use our professional judgement and speak from
our professional judgement and say okay, I judged,
I evaluated the papers as this.
This is what the A group was like and that's why
they got A's.
That will not invite questions.
Because they're not in a position to question
the standards of our discipline, they just can't do it.
So I think that if we get into a place where we are constantly
justifying ourselves, we're leaving ourselves wide open.
We're inviting challenges that, if we're coming from
our professional judgement, we don't.
Yeah?
(male speaker). Is this grading style
just as valid with non-traditional students
as with traditional students?
(Dr. Nilson). Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.
But I still like the next one better.
But again, if you're new to an institution and you don't know
what to expect, you might want to do this the first time around
at least just to get a feel because you won't, you won't
know what the next one will be.
I mean, later on you get a feel for the best and the worst
to expect, but if you're changing institutions,
hey, all bets are off.
Did I see another?
Yes?
(female speaker). Do you ever
do test grading first?
I mean, kind of in your mind, how, what do you think, and then
let the students see it so they know, or is that backwards?
(Dr. Nilson). You're way ahead of me.
Yes, and that's what you talk about, let the students see it,
that's why I like the other one better.
But, again, this has its place and some people swear by it,
what can I say, you know.
Do I use it?
No, I use the other one.
So okay, this is holistic grading of the other kind,
for really any size class.
And what you do, the way you place where you start,
and you can start this right after you conceive
of the assignment or the question or whatever.
So you do this in the summer, it doesn't matter.
You create a rubric.
Three steps to creating a rubric, and we're going to be,
going to be, quote, covering these steps.
And I want you to also be doing this.
We're going to try this out as well, but let's just worry about
what it is.
It's an assessment or grading tool that lays out very specific
expectations for an assignment, and again, it can be any kind
of assignment with students, that the students construct.
And it usually describes each level of performance quality
on the selected assessment criteria.
Now when I say usually, there's a variety of rubric that I'm not
even going to talk about here because I think it's,
I think it's, quote, dangerous.
So it doesn't quite do this, but let's not even worry about that.
Let's go for the best method, let's go for the best kind.
So it does describe each level of performance quality
on selected assessment criteria.
So, I don't know if that tells you very much.
But anyway, to do this, to use a rubric to grade holistically,
you've got to except a few things.
You can't assess student work on every criteria you can think of.
Oh, you can, but you'll be there all day, okay.
Because when you think about it, if you really take inventory
of your brain, you're probably carrying around a couple
dozen criteria for judging work in your discipline.
And we just carry these around, we don't even think about it.
I mean, it's not only the quality of writing,
but we're looking at getting to the point.
We look at does this match the sort of format you're supposed
to get in a journal.
Does this ramble on, does it blah blah blah?
I mean, there's so many things that we're judging,
not to mention issues of methodology and data analysis
and other, and talk about all the limitations.
We just have this junk in our head, right?
Well, oftentimes what we'll do, we'll pick up student papers,
and unless we discipline ourselves, we use them all
on the student paper.
Again, we can be there all day.
Poor student who doesn't have a clue of what's going on
in our brains.
I mean, how can they?
They're not in the discipline.
They didn't get a PhD.
If they did, they wouldn't be sitting in your class, right?
They'd be teaching it.
So you can't do this, you can't do this.
You've got to say okay, I'm not going to assess
students on all the measures of quality that I know,
or all the dimensions of quality that I know.
Students will never, ever come close to meeting
all your standards.
And students can't work on improving their performance
on every criteria you can think of.
They don't know what the criteria are, but they can't
focus on all that.
You should be happy if you give them four things to be concerned
about and they focus on those four things.
And that means that those other 20 things that are sitting
in your brain, out.
Forget about them, you're not using them to assess this paper
or this project.
You said you were going to assess on these four,
students focus on these four, that's it, that's it.
It's really, it's disciplining our mind in a way that's taking
away from what our mind can offer, but it's only being fair
to our students, because they can only work on so much
at once.
They're new to your field.
So, then we get to soul searching.
Well, what is worth assessing?
What's worth grading on?
What's really important to me in this particular assignment?
So we're looking at this particular course,
at this particular level, but we're also looking at this
particular assignment or test question.
What is worth grading on?
And of course, what's important.
You might look at some of these things,
well this is never important.
Well, it just depends on your discipline, and it also depends
on the level of students that you're teaching.
But this is a list, it's not exhaustive.
You can certainly add other ones.
It's not going to do a very good job of covering certain fields,
let's say, like the arts.
But in any case, it gives you a sense of variety of what
you might assess on.
Now, we have the urge to assess on all
of these that apply, right?
But that's what we can't do.
We must pick and choose.
So this is step one, is the picking and choosing,
what will we really care about in this assignment.
This is the first step to doing a rubric and it's also
your first exercise.
I want you to think of a key writing assignment or
essay question that requires and assesses higher order thinking.
Now this might be one that you already assign or ask on a test,
but as a result you have no life, okay.
Or it might be one you wish you could assign, you'd love to
be able to assign, but you think you can't at this point.
So venture in, act of faith, use that particular assignment
or test question.
So from this list of possible assessment criteria, and again,
add your own if applicable.
Which three, four, or five, five is pushing it,
but which three, four, or five are most important
for your students to demonstrate?
What's the point of the assignment?
Which student learning objectives does this
assignment really serve?
So you might want to go back to your student learning objectives
for the course, or some objectives.
That is objectives that help students meet
a higher objective.