In this project, I tried to gure out the reliability of the

grades of students’ works. This project is a website

article that was written for other students and
professors who were having the same concerns. I
chose this genre because I don’t think the
argumentation was persuasive enough to be a
professional journal, also the main points of my article
were relatively new and could t in the discussion of
young people, so I think a website article would be a
better genre.

I was aiming to write an argumentative essay, but

during the writing, I found it di cult to argue the points
that weren’t originally mine. Also as I read the
instructions for this project I found that I was supposed
to introduce the “conversation” here to a friend, which
means I should be more of a storyteller rather than a
speaker. Then I was clueless and I went to see the
sample projects, and I found I was really enjoying
reading sample C. Therefore I chose the website article
blog as my genre eventually, and work all the way
through until this project was done.

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 Should We Trust Our
Grades?
By Meng Li

As a student, I’ve been dealing with scores and grades for a long time. Have you
ever thought about the reliability of grading: can those scores represent my level
of writing?

Many students has got confused by the score professor gave on their writing,
whether it’s lot higher or lower than the expectation. The same confusions had
not only affect students, but also many scholars. There has been lots of voices on
whether students should treat the score as a major feedback from teachers. I was
also eagerly to know the answer, since I’ve been confused by it for a long time.
Let’s start with my story!

I used to love writing when I was in elementary school, but that passion
got erased gradually during my junior high school. In China, we have to
write an 800-1000 words essay for each Chinese exam. I still remember
the rst essay I wrote, about the most memorable thing in my childhood. I
used a lot of rhetorical devices, metaphors, and environmental descriptions
I learned from class in my essay. When I handed in my essay, I just felt
satisfaction and con dence: I didn’t even know how to revise it where to
revise if I had a chance. Then after a few days, the score came out: 26/40,
and nothing else. I was shocked, did the grader mean to write 36 but
accidentally got it wrong? I went to the teacher, and she told me some of
the problems with my essay: “I don’t see the meaning of this description. I
don’t know why you are mentioning this. I......” To sum up her words, she
didn’t understand the points of my essay, so it’s not good.

In the exam after that, I was asked to prove a point: people need to learn
to change him/herself to t in a group. I decided to use an argumentative
essay since I couldn’t search for any experience of my own to write that. I
was nervous and afraid because that was my rst time writing an

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 argumentative essay. A few days later I got the score of this essay: 37/40!
The teacher even showed my essay to other students as a sample of an
argumentative essay.

From then on I started to write argumentative essays in exams as more as

possible, since I thought maybe I got some talent for it, also because I
thought that would make my essay more readable to the teacher and I
could get a higher score on it. My expectation didn’t work out; I’ve never
got that high score again.

My teacher told us to write about personal experiences as possible as we

can. I tried, a low score. She said my points were hard to understand. I
wrote an argumentative essay, a type of essay that use multiple paragraphs
to prove my points, low score. I didn’t know what she wants, or what a
higher essay grade takes. Gradually I started to doubt: was the system of
scoring students’ essays really reliable and helpful for students?

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 Though there are doubts on the form of grading as a feedback from
professors, I had to admit the existence logic of this essay-scoring system.
It must have some unique advantages for it to has exist for a long time.
William Condon has proved how this essay-grading system is reasonable:

William  Condon  stated clearly the general

form, grading rubric, and what teachers
were expecting from the students’ essays in
his article, “Looking beyond judging and
By reading through the ranking: Writing assessment as a generative
explanation he/she had on practice.” He stated that there are 6 learning
each essay exam, I can indeed goals graders would like to see from students’
know how professors would writing:
grade each essay, and how my 1. Critical and creative thinking:
points were lost, rather than just
getting a score and nding 2. Quantitative and symbolic reasoning
nothing else useful. I would be
less confused about my score if 3. Informational Literacy
any rubric like his was given,
yet the fact was that’s only the 4. Communication
standard of grading that only
shares among teachers. 5. Self in Society

6. Speciality

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 In my opinion, I would take Condon’s point as a teacher’s perspective.
There are also voices from students, and are many people experience the
same situation like me: the only feedback for our essay was just a grade.

As I was doubting the usefulness and the necessity of scoring

students’ essays, Ward Martin Amy, as a student, was also
assessing the outcome and effect of essay scoring. In her
article, “Recovering response: Emphasizing writing as a
relational practice,” she mentioned that grading students' essay
would essentially lead the students to nd another way to get a
higher grade instead of nding out their weaknesses and
improve.
 I couldn’t agree more with that, since that’s what
I did when I began writing argumentative essays: I
was writing for scores, not progress.  

As Amy implied, a simple number could neither provide any suggestion

for student’s essay, nor point out their problems. Then if grade itself can’t
help students learn anything, and how about the reliability of it? Can
grades of essays re ect the writing skill of a students? it totally re ect
students’ writing level?

C. E Ball stated in her article, “Student writing must be graded by the

teacher,” that teachers’ scores would certainly be biased and different
teachers would give different scores regarding the same essay.
She also showed her agreement with Amy: “But when students have
only one teacher in their classroom, and that one teacher’s assessment
carries all the weight and
authority, students learn to
write for the teacher instead of
 I agree with that: writing, or any
expecting the writing to do
form of art, is a personal thing. I
anything on its own.”
couldn’t judge if my teacher can’t
understand my ideas was her fault or
mine.
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 But if grades from the teacher were not reliable and helpful, how

could is there any approach for us to we get any improvement on writing?

Of course, there are other ways. A simple number won’t tell students

where to improve and what to avoid for the next time, but comments and

suggestions can.

Exercising peer review would be a good approach for students to find

out their problems and get progress. (Ball 4) Peer review wasn’t just peers

looking at each other’ s essays and writing about whether they like them or

not. According to Sonya L Armstrong’s article, “Whither 'peer review'?:

Terminology matters for the writing classroom,” peer responses, peer

editing, peer evaluation, and peer criticism are all useful and efficient ways

of helping students to get progress from other students. By listing out

different ways of peer review, Armstrong successfully illustrated that peer

review is a helpful way for students to improve their writing skills. I think

this article would support the idea of Ball, who said peer review would be

a good way for students to get progress on writing. Armstrong explained

more about the methodology and how to use peer review in class as a

teacher.

 Scoring for students’ works would still be the most popular way for

teachers to responds to students’ academic level even after the long

discussion above. Then how could students understand the meaning and

the scoring of professors better? , Chanon Adsanatham, suggested a way in

her article, “Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using Student-

Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital Projects.” In

her article, she spent several paragraphs on introducing her research on

multimodal digital projects,. She explained including its meaning the

project’s meaning, how it would reveal one’s ability, and the history of it.

The author also included her students’ comments on this project. One of

her students said she learnt what the professor was looking for when

grading through this project. From this feedback we can see that the

students understood the professor’s standard of grading. I think it would be

helpful for students to I also agree that sometimes it’s good for students to

wear their teachers’ shoes sometimes, since if so it would be easier for

them to understand professor’s grading and know their problems.

The way that the teacher letting students to

make the rubric enable them to learn how the
professor would grade a project, and thus learn to
understand how each score of their essays,
project, presentations was formed. Then they
can gure out their weakness and improve.
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 Another thing to mentioned is that, not only should students tried to

understand the scoring rubric of professors, teachers should also have

alternative ways to evaluate each students’ work. In the article “Examining

Instructional Practices, Intellectual Challenge, and Supports for African

American Student Writers,” written by Chandra L Alston, the author

summarized the writing situation of a large amount of African American

students., and the She also include analyses on how their background

would affect their writing. By giving numerical data during the arguments,

the author made the article more plausible and convincing. Alston then

explained how he got those results with explicit reasoning and quotations.

By doing so, he further enhance the power of this article, and made the

ideas more cogent.

I was really impressive when the author mentioned that as they were
assessing the writing skill of those students , they took students’
background and IQ into consideration, but then I agreed with that
idea. It’s more reasonable to assess one’s work under the knowledge
of what they can do based on their background.

To sum up, grades should not be the only feedback students’ could get

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 from teachers. The scores of works should neither be the standard teachers used to

evaluate the students’ overall ability, nor should them be the sources that students

used for self-recognition. Teachers should have their alternative ways for re ecting

students’ writing skills, and students should in turn understand the grading rubric of

teachers and learn to improve from that. Also, getting more peer review and

comments from teachers would be very helpful for students to get progress.

Work Cited
Adsanatham, Chanon. (2012). Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using
Student-Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital
Projects. Computers and Composition 29.2, 152-174.

Alston, Chandra L. (2012). Examining Instructional Practices, Intellectual

Challenge, and Supports for African American Student Writers. Research
in the Teaching of English 47.2, 112-144.

Armstrong, Sonya L.; Eric J. Paulson. (2008). Whither 'peer review’?:

Terminology matters for the writing classroom. Teaching English in
the Two-Year College 35.4, 398-407.

Amy, Ward Martin. (2004). Recovering response: Emphasizing writing as

relational practice. Issues in Writing 14.2

Ball , C. E., & Loewe ed., D. M. (2021, May 2). 6.5: Student writing must
be graded by the teacher. Humanities LibreTexts. Retrieved April 6,
2022, from https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Composition/
Specialized_Composition/
Book%3A_Bad_Ideas_About_Writing_(Ball_and_Loewe)/
06%3A_Bad_Ideas_About_Assessing_Writing/
6.05%3A_Student_Writing_Must_be_Graded_by_the_Teacher

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 Condon, William. (2009). Looking beyond judging and ranking: Writing
assessment as a generative practice. Assessing Writing 14.3,
141-156. https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.asw.2009.09.004