I totally tracked with Lynn Bloom’s “Why I (Used To) Hate to Give Grades” until her last few paragraphs. The reason why is the same reason I consider this post a double-whammy in Classroom Praxis and Pre-Class Reading Response: I tried it with freshmen, and it didn’t work.
A few weeks ago I had the Bloomian inclination to have freshman ENC1101 students grade their own drafts. My thinking was partially on par with Bloom’s (in that they would shoulder the work of proof), but also around other ideas like:
- it would force them to read their own work critically (instead of cranking it out and handing it in to me as soon as they hit the page limit),
- they would be tricked into practicing the art of rhetoric and argument, which is arguably one of our main teacherly goals of instruction in ENC1101,
- they would feel less entitled to A’s once they found flaws in their writing,
- they would begin to understand, in using the grading criteria, what “standard” is used by our Department to determine their grades,
- they would be forced to participate in a dialogue about their writing’s strengths and weakness, rather than stick to the age-old submit-and-receive relationship of grades from the teacher,
- they might start to recognize their identity, authority and capacity to shape their own life and experience as maturing college adults, rather than passive, powerless freshmen,
- a boatload of other idealistic reasons.
Almost all of them gave themselves A’s, though I interestingly had many students — largely female, if we want to break it down by gender — who underestimated their grade like Suzy. That might have been fine, but they had zero proof or argument as to why they deserved the grade. All this signals to me that the requirement in Bloom’s method is that you have students who are mature enough to handle the burden of self-evaluation. And it seems like that’s something they learn over time, maybe with age. On the bright side, it also showed me that there’s merit to what they’re learning in ENC: that they need to learn what argument is, and how to do it.