Gradatorium: Criteria Explained

To understand grading you have to understand what our goal is in compiling the collection Points of Departure. We want to interest you in reading that engages with complex issues, and in turn that inspires you to write. We think the best way to do this is to give you essays that are relevant to your lives today, and that tackle issues that you will inherit tomorrow. We believe that with practice, you will begin to find connections within these essays that help you to understand the world around you, and allow you to begin making your own contributions in writing. Whether you agree with Pollan or Kingsolver or Sullivan or any of the other authors we've included in the reader is not what's important to us; what matters to us is that you can demonstrate that you understand their positions and projects, and that you can present a position and project of your own that contributes to the ongoing conversation. Students who can do this, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with the texts and authors, usually end up receiving better grades. Believe it or not, it's that simple.

We think every student entering college should be able to read and understand the essays included in Points of Departure. This, then, is our base line for measuring performance.

C and C+ level papers: here, a writer addresses the assignment question, and is able to accurately represent the positions in the assigned readings, but may often conflate the author’s position with his own. More often than not, writers at this level stick to generalities, and may only just get beyond summary—“It’s important to respect animals" or "I agree with Edley that racial profiling is wrong." In order to pass, however, a student must also begin explaining why profiling may be wrong, or how we can respect animals while eating them. A passing paper must get beyond summarizing the authors’ positions and projects in at least a few places. Students often get into passing range by beginning to use quotation to distinguish between their ideas and the authors’ ideas, their words and those of the essay. The attempts may not always be successful, and there may be occasional misreading, but the student is beginning use the conventions of writing consciously. Finally a C or C+ paper will probably not demonstrate organizational control at the paper level, but must demonstrate solid individual paragraph construction, and the beginnings of consistent sentence-level control.

B and B+ level papers: here, the writer moves beyond accurate summary, rudimentary quote-use, and the tentative formation of a project to critical and sustained engagement with the readings, especially through accurate, correct, and more sophisticated use of quotation. They also show more strength in paragraph transitions, and sustained paragraph development over the course of the paper. Students may begin explaining over a series of paragraphs why certain positions are maintained and what consequences follow from adopting one position over another. The focus is less on establishing that the student has read the essays with understanding, and more on demonstrating that the student is actively engaging with the complexity presented in the essays and the assignment questions. Papers in this range also read more smoothly (that is, cleanly and correctly), and demonstrate a greater ease with the conventions of writing.

A level papers: here, the writer is “putting it all together:” engaging actively with the assignment question and assigned texts through effective use of quotation, proposing an original position and project, and demonstrating a sense and purpose of the paper as a whole. Students who reach A level in 100 and 100R have begun to produce papers that resemble the Expos papers of students in 101—some stronger, some weaker—but all showing command of the skills that are most important in 100 and 100R: strong reading comprehension; demonstration of a unique position and project independent of the assignment, authors and texts; effective quote-use to further that project; solid paragraph construction; sustained paragraph development over the course of the paper; and consistent sentence-level control.

Whether you are considering our suggested grading criteria in all its detail or at the highly condensed version of it that we've just provided above, you are bound to find the whole issue of what grades represent largely abstract until you look at some real student papers. In the pages that follow, we provide examples of actual papers written in our program and we offer explanations for why the papers have been assessed as they have. Let’s start with the C paper.

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