Introduction
What is the Gradatorium?
This is our attempt to remove the mystery from the grading
process. Too often, we've found, students don't know why they received
a B on one paper and a C on the next one. In an environment where grading
seems to be entirely or primarily subjective, then it's hard to know how
to improve. Under such circumstances, the best you can do is hope you
get lucky and write "what the teacher wants."
We think that it's best if our students know what we mean
by a successful essay and we also think that it is nearly impossible for
students to learn when it isn't clear what the standards for assessment
are. And so, with the help of many of the teachers and administrators
we've worked with over the years, we've put together some training materials
that are meant to take the mystery out of the grading process.
In our program at Rutgers University, we use a version of
the grading criteria we've published here to train everyone who teaches
in our program. We also make the criteria available to all students in
our program, as well. That way, everyone knows what we mean when we say
this paper has succeeded and that one needs to be improved. By removing
the mystery from the grading process, we think it's easier to get everyone
to focus on the real project of the new humanities: not guessing what
the teacher wants, but using class time and the writing process to generate
new insights into the challenges and the possibilities that the twenty-first
century holds for us all.
In the following sections, we give you a chance to see our
grading criteria and learn about our standards. You'll be able to see
sample papers for a C, B, and A and our explanations for why the
papers received the grades that they did.
Then you get to be the teacher and grade a sample paper. When you've
made your decision, you will have a chance to compare your grade to the
actual grade and see how good a grader you are (and how hard grading can
be).
Now, your teacher's grading system may differ from ours,
but this will give you a sense of how to think about what teachers look
for and what improvement looks like.
So, how do we determine a grade? What is it that we are
looking for? It all starts with the grading criteria.
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