What to do next

There are a number of ways you can use what you've learned here to help you understand your own writing better:

1. Continue grading. Grading is never just choosing a letter and then moving to the next paper. Instead, it always involves explaining what the student needs to do to improve his or her writing. So, spend some time going over these sample papers. Use the grading criteria to focus on what each paper is not yet doing. If the B meets one or two of the criteria for a B, then what else could that student have done to make the grade more solid? In other words, don't just identify what each paper does to get that grade, but think about what each paper still needs to do. Not only will this help you get an even better grasp of the grading criteria, but it will also help you do the same for your own paper—figure out what you still need to do.
   

2. Re-read your papers. Look back over your own work with an eye towards the elements highlighted through the grading criteria like connection and position. Then review your teacher's comments on your papers, looking for language that reflects the grading criteria. Is your teacher focusing on your connections or your position? What language does your teacher use to describe these elements? Re-reading the comments with the grading criteria in mind should help you understand more fully why your paper received the grade it did. What's more, it can help you identify what you need to work on to move your grade higher.
   

3. Talk it out. Talk with your teacher about her or his grading style. You need to think of your teacher as a consultant and you need to work with your teacher in that way. While your teacher probably doesn't have a grading criteria written out, he or she has clear standards for what makes a C or B or an A. The point is not to argue over how your work has been assessed in the past; the point is to understand what constitutes the best performance in your class. The point, in other words, is to learn what it is that the best papers do.
   

4. Adopt the vocabulary. If you don't understand your grade, try using the vocabulary of your teacher's grading criteria. Let the vocabulary of your teacher's criteria provide a common ground for you and your teacher to communicate. For example, if your teacher tells you you're having problems with connection, you might go to her or his office hours with your paper and point to the connections you saw yourself making. Providing this specific ground, in the context of a common language, can open up new understandings. Your teacher might then talk about the ways in which the connection worked or didn't. It's better than going to an office hour and just saying, "I don't know why I got this grade." Instead, you'd be saying, "I don't know why I got this grade, because I thought I was making a good analytical connection here on page two."
   

5. Use the criteria. The criteria are a road map to better grades, so use them to prioritize your development. For example, you know from the criteria that connection and position are both very important, so you can focus on these elements in your writing rather than others (such as your conclusion, for example).
   

6. Discuss with others. Form grading groups to discuss grades and to work on drafts. Everyone in the group can use the Gradatorium to get a handle on the criteria. Then you can exchange drafts and discuss them in terms of the criteria. You can even take turns grading each other's work. It's often hard for students to grade each other's work seriously, either because they want to be "nice" or because they're afraid they're grading would be wrong. In neither case are you doing that other student a favor. Use the criteria; in that way you're not "judging" the paper, you're just matching up with what we recommend.
   

7. Practice, practice, practice. All of these steps are good measures to help you understand how grading works in relation to your own writing, but you should also understand how very hard grading is, even for your teacher. We spend a whole week orienting new teachers in our program in the fall; we meet twice during the semester to review the progress of each class and to address the concerns of any teacher; and teachers regularly call each other for help evaluating specific, borderline papers. So, don't expect to understand grading entirely from just this tutorial. Instead, rather than focusing on some external standard, focus on your own work. In the end, it's never really about what grade you get. It's about the skills you learn, the progress you make, the ways in which you become a better writer—no matter the grade.