We often get questions about editing student essays, or questions like, don’t you have a rubric for the writing projects?
Yes, and no, and maybe. We are not huge rubric fans, but we understand the need for them.
There are a couple of purposes for rubrics.
1. standardization of grades
2. mass editing
3. aid to the novice teacher or teaching assistant, who is not an experienced essay grader.
Rubrics work to assure that everyone is held to the same standard. They allow for three or four instructors to grade the same types of paper and more or less come out with grades that are evaluated similarly.
Rubrics also serve as guidelines for mass education purposes. They allow a teacher to grade a ton of essays with a standard in his hand so he can browse through (without totally reading the content), look for the components that the essay is supposed to include, and then he can quickly assign the points the student deserves and move onto the next essay. That is the sort of thing you see on the ACT or SAT essays where instructors are quick trained to assess such essays.
Finally, if you are a novice writing instructor, a rubric is a nice thing to lean on as you learn how to assess writing.
So, do we have rubrics? Well, we don’t call them rubrics, but we provide editing checklists for each essay, and if you want a rubric, go through our macro and micro editing check lists, assign points to each check point, and voila, you have a rubric.
But let me also warn you against rubrics. We have all seen the ‘if Shakespeare had submitted this to today’s English teacher’ type of articles, where a major marvelous work of his would have been torn to shreds by a teacher who follows a rubric. Any standardized rubric can totally miss artistry or ingenuity on the part of the writer. In addition to going through your rubric to make sure the student follows the assignment, you need to read the work globally, carefully, and discern with your own judgment (rather than with a rubric) whether the student followed the spirit of the assignment, whether the student completed the assignment, and how well the student did so.
Here is a pretty typical rubric: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/printouts/Essay%20Rubric.pdf
This pretty standard rubric does a lot of good stuff, but the one thing I see missing is an evaluation of the supports for the thesis. Nowhere does it cover the arguments inside the essay and evaluate how well they support the thesis, how strong or innovative or new they are, which order they are presented in, and whether they come from a variety of sources of information.
So yes, you can start with a rubric, like the one listed above. It is a good baseline for evaluating an essay, but the substance of the essay is its content. The content is the arguments that are put forth to support the thesis statement, and they need to be looked at most closely.
More on that in the next installment.