Post2019
I Stopped Grading and It Changed Everything
by Stephanie Batkie
Like so many other effective writing instructors, Stephanie Batkie knows that the amount of red ink splotching a student’s paper correlates little with what the student learns. In addition to being a medievalist whose research explores John Gower’s Latin works, Batkie also directs the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at University of the South, affectionately known as Sewanee. Her approach—grading student essays with students—comes with excellent bona fides.
And it comes with endorsements from other instructors. I first learned about Batkie’s approach in a facebook posting, and I had incorporated it into my grading practices during the Spring 2020 term. When we suddenly pivoted to remote teaching in March 2020, I continued with this grading practice. It quickly became a key feature of my online teaching. Despite her caveat that this approach might not work outside the confines of small, residential institutions, I can testify that it worked for me at a mid-sized public university with a large commuter population. --Candace Barrington
Several semesters ago, I made a decision. I wasn’t going to grade papers anymore.
No collecting papers. No shuttling them dutifully back and forth between my office and my living room. No navigating student excuses about jammed printers. No weekends where I tunneled my way through one pile before the next arrived. No marking up with pens (of any color). No commenting in Microsoft Word. No emails about “can you see my comments in Microsoft Word?” No Google Docs. No fancy LMS annotations. Nothing.
The thing is, I didn’t like grading. It was without question the worst part of my job. So, I stopped doing it.
Do students in my classes still write papers? Yes. Do they get feedback on them? Lots. Do these papers eventually get assigned letters or numbers that I can use to calculate what I turn into the Registrar? They do. But not in the way they used to.
What I decided to try was something I think of as “Collaborative Grading,” and it isn’t really new. In fact, like so many good things I’ve discovered about teaching, it’s something I stole from someone else. (Thank you forever, Aaron Tugendhaft.)
When a paper is due in one of my classes, students email their papers and I save them in their class folder. I don’t look at them–I just save them. Over the next few days, students make appointments to meet with me in my office, usually for 30-45 minutes each, depending on the length of the paper. Before their appointment, I do a few things. I print out two copies of what they turned in: one for them, and one for me. I print out a copy of a feedback sheet to use during our conversation. And I grab some highlighters.
You see, I discovered that the thing I disliked about grading was the inverse of what I loved about teaching. It was an activity that felt solitary, disheartening, and punitive. Using the traditional model, even with a host of technological aids, I was alone, trying to piece through what a student was trying to say, getting frustrated and angry, and making comments that were (if I’m being brutally honest) mostly a justification for the letter or number I was going to print at the end of their work. This is not to say that I didn’t have good papers – I often did. And I often placed them at the bottom of the pile as a “reward” for getting through the more difficult ones. But what wasn’t happening was teaching. If my students were struggling to try and communicate something difficult to me through their writing, I was in the same position: trying to communicate something difficult through mine. In poor, scrunched-up scribbles in the margins. Or with a series of coded marks they needed to translate. Or even in long, detailed letters I stapled to their papers or added to their electronic documents. And which, I’m fairly certain, rarely got read.
How useful is seeing “WHY??” or “awk” in the margin anyway?
“Really?”
Now, the student comes into my office and sits down. After a brief preamble on my part and some nervous throat-clearing on theirs, I give them a copy of their paper and they begin to read it aloud. When we get to something I think we should talk about, we stop and talk about it. But more importantly, when we get to something they think we should talk about, we stop and talk about it. And so it goes. As we move together through the paper, I jot down notes on my copy, and they do the same on theirs. Some quick, color-coded highlighting (green for good points, yellow for needs revision, orange for errors) lets them see at a glance where the strongest and weakest points are. At the end of the session, I fill out a short feedback sheet that organizes some things for them to think about for revisions, and we talk about what skills or elements they want to prioritize for their next assignment. I also ask them what grade the paper warrants, given our conversation.
The grade they come up with is usually the grade I would have assigned on my own. If I feel I need to adjust their estimation, chances are it’s upward.
They almost invariably thank me as they leave.
The advantages to this method are many, but the most profound is this: grading is now where students learn things. It becomes part of teaching, not something that happens afterward. When a student’s writing gets wobbly or awkward, it’s because these are the times when they are struggling with ideas they don’t yet have the ability to put into language. And instead of becoming increasingly irritated by unclear prose, I can help that student because this is when their ideas are the most interesting and complex. It’s where they need the most guidance, the most help. Grammar errors? It is far, far easier to explain restrictive clauses or semicolons in person than trying to do so in an exhausted marginal comment you are sure you have written 17 times before. Instead of scrawling “expand here” next to a sentence, I just ask them to tell me more. And they do. And it’s great. Do they need to reorganize? Fine! We will make up a new outline out of their topic sentences together. Right now.
What’s more, because the student is now part of a conversation rather than a recipient of feedback, their participation makes this truly collaborative–which comes with requirements as well as opportunities. Because students are responsible for their own note-taking, they have to process what we are talking about during our conversation, evaluating what they will take away with them. Those difficult moments in the paper where things aren’t clear? They have to decide what they want to say. Does something sound awkward when read aloud? They will be the ones to stop and say “something needs to be different here.” And then we will fix it together, talking through why the new sentence works and why the old one didn’t.
But perhaps most importantly, we can have a much larger conversation across the semester about what their individual strengths and weaknesses are as writers. As individuals. We can come up with a plan to focus on an element we see in one paper and prioritize it for the next. They come to see that they can change their writing, and best of all, they can see themselves getting better because I am now in a position to help them identify their skills and recognize their own progress.
The advantages for me are significant as well, make no mistake. On the practical side, it is impossible for me to grade after I leave the office. I grade in the office, and I stop when the day is over. No more weekends. No more late nights. I also usually get papers back to them within 3 or 4 days after they turn them in, which means no more comments on course evaluations about grading turnaround times. (In fact, I haven’t received any negative comments about grades or grading since I started this practice.) And though the grading days tend to be long, I don’t actually spend more time meeting with a student than I would grading their paper on my own. However, instead of feeling deflated, wrung out, and exhausted, I leave the office energized because I got to spend time having meaningful conversations with people about a subject I care deeply about. And I get to see that they do, too.
And it’s been wonderful. It is not an exaggeration to say that this has been the single most dramatic improvement in my professional life. Honestly.
Yet, in reflecting on everything here, and in the conversations I’ve had extolling the virtues and pleasure of this system, two things strike me.
One, that I will not be going back. The rewards I’ve discovered are too great. Everything from the value in students seeing me respond (often through facial expressions) to their work for the first time as a person and not as a grading machine, to the sense of deep joy when a student sees their writing change leads me to believe that this is what I want my work to do.
But two, that the ability to opt into this form of grading is something that is a gift. I benefit enormously from teaching at a small, liberal arts institution in which my teaching load is low, my writing-intensive classes are small, and 100% of my students are residential and “traditional” in their age-range. They are not working full time. They don’t commute to campus. They take a full load of classes and live in the middle of the woods with one (blinking) stoplight and nothing else around.
Unquestionably, being able to grade in this way is made easier – if not entirely possible – because of this teaching environment. And when I sit down with my students, I am deeply aware of it. I am grateful for the ability to help them in this way and to have access to a mode of engaging with my academic labor that feels this meaningful and personal. But it is also an argument for why small classes and limited course loads should be non-negotiable when it comes to university structures. I am able to do this because I have 15 students in my English 101 class, not 30. I am able to do this because I have the time in my week to schedule several hours of meetings because I’m not teaching 4 classes. I can devote this time to my students because I have dependable and affordable childcare. And so much more.
As dedicated as I am to this method, and as deeply it has changed my pedagogy and the learning of my students, it is also one of the best examples I’ve experienced of how the educational structures we work within determine what we can do for and with our students. And how much and too often they prevent and limit as much as they make possible and provide.
Collaborative grading has made my classroom a more lively place, a place where multiple student voices have space, a place where writing is a process and not a product, and a place where language is not graded by a rubric but in a meaningful conversation with another person. It decenters and demystifies my role in the grading process, while giving students power over how they want to develop.
And as one of my students a few semesters ago said: “This is what I came to college for.”
He’s not alone in that, but he is very fortunate to be able to experience it. As am I.