Our Grading Criteria

What follows is the result of the collaborative effort by the administrators of the Writing Program at Rutgers University to define our developing sense of how best to describe, discuss, and evaluate the kinds of papers that students at our university produce when using The New Humanities Reader. We first made our grading criteria public about five years ago in response to requests made by teachers and students in our program to demystify the grading process. While we initially resisted these efforts to codify our standards, we've since found that making the standards clear to our teachers, our students, our fellow adminstrators, and ourselves benefits everyone. We have found that the criteria make it clear that we are primarily interested in what students can do with their writing. What the students say with their writing is up to them, in other words, and doesn't influence the assessment of their work.

In our program, we use the criteria for two reasons: we want to provide all our teachers with a common vocabulary for discussing their students' writing; and, we want the standards in our program to be open and available to everyone involved in the assessment process--students, teachers, and other university administrators. We believe that everyone benefits from a transparent system of evaluation: students have a clear sense of where they stand; teachers have a common reference to rely on in assessing their students' work; and peers and colleagues throughout the university system have direct access to what the students are being asked to do in the required writing course. In this way, the criteria make everyone involved in soliciting and assessing student work accountable and that, we've found, removes a good deal of the mystery and the potential for abuse from the grading process.

We hope you find this useful. If you have comments about the criteria, questions, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We'd like to hear from you!