Case
Revisions and Editing

After teaching a unit on editing and revising, Ms. Minturn asks her students to pull out a hard copy of an essay they composed earlier in the year. She breaks the class into pairs and asks them to read and suggest edits and revisions on their partners' essays. A few students who didn't put much effort into the essays before have a lot of edits and revisions. Her students that did good jobs on their essays earlier in the year only have a few revisions and edits. She collects the revisions and grades each student according to a rubric on the effectiveness of his or her editing. How should she score the revisions?

Posted on: 10/11/14 | Views: 745
Solution #1
Ms Minturn should score the revisions based on correctness and quality rather than quantity. She can have a criteria for completeness as well to show that students did not miss revisions in their editing. Revisions should be correct and of a high quality work which improves the essay. The quantity of revisions does not matter since some students will have a higher quantity than others based on effort put forth earlier in the semester. That is why the quantity of revisions should not be included as criteria on this rubric.

I agree that quality of the revisions, not quantity, should be the driving factor in grading this assessment. Any student can put ink on paper, but if they are not effective edits and revisions the student did not grasp the concept of editing and revision.

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Solution #2
In order to encourage the students to put forth more effort with editing and revising Ms. Minturn could develop a checklist which includes a big portion of the grade being her observation of work put forth during the class time given with the partner. This would allow for participation to be included in the grade also.
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Solution #3
While grading for the quality instead of quantity of revisions would work, next time Ms. Minturn does this, I would suggest that she give students guidelines for what they should look for when revising and editing. She should create a checklist for students to use during this process to ensure that they are looking for a variety of ways to improve their essays. Some students would focus only on grammatical errors, while others might focus on ideas and elaboration. Making the criteria clear up front would help with the grading issues for this.
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