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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