Long ago, a trend arose in the corporate world to have employees complete a self-evaluation and combine that with a supervisor’s evaluation for the purpose of analyzing an employee’s previous year’s performance. When I first encountered this, I thought that it was a matter of fairness. However, after reading Lynn Z. Bloom’s “Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades, I have come to see that there is value in self-evaluation.
While a good chunk of her article outlines the problems with grading, the important message lies in the last half. By having the students evaluate themselves prior to her evaluation, she increases the students’ self-awareness. Had she done this progressively throughout the semester, I believe she would have seen a greater improvement in the quality of the student’s work.
I have seen the results of this process first-hand. My partner, for whom English is a second language, is required to do this type of self-evaluation for his employment. I help him complete the form every year, and I can see that it has helped him become a better employee. It really does make a difference in making a change if you identify the pattern of error or area that needs improvement yourself. After all, some of the newer adaptations of Blooms Taxonomy include “meta-thinking” in the highest levels.
The FAU Writing Department approaches this type of self-evaluation with the assigned midterm and final evaluations. I think that as assigned, these evaluations fall short of the bar set by Bloom, and I will be adjusting the prompt next semester for 1102 to make better use of these assignments.