Official Grading Criteria

Skills to practice and acquire in 100 and 100R

With consistent practice over the semester, students in 100 and 100R will demonstrate that they are making improvements in both their reading and writing skills. However, as with all Writing Program courses, grades are not based upon improvement, but upon demonstration of basic reading and writing skills. These skills are arranged below in the order that we hope students would acquire them, and the order we will emphasize in teaching. Students will be employing all of these skills in each paper to the level they can, but improvement on them may be gradual and varied. We believe that improvement will be best made in this order. Students' papers should show their proficiency in:

• Reading comprehension: locating and understanding an author's position within an essay; following the development of an author’s project within an essay; distinguishing between contradictory positions within an essay or essays; understanding vocabulary words in the essays and assignments; using a dictionary effectively

• Project and position: articulating a project and taking a clear position in their own responses to assignment questions and assigned texts

• Using quotation: selecting relevant quotes and using quotation effectively to further their projects and engage with the texts; this also includes proper incorporation of quotes within their own sentences, and correct citation

• Connective thinking: making specific connections between texts, particularly between ideas in texts, that help them answer the assignment questions and contribute to their own projects

• Sentence-level control and grammar: identifying and correcting errors, especially fused sentences, sentence fragments, and agreement errors (subject-verb, number, pronoun); sentence-level control includes proofreading for typos and eliminating errors caused by carelessness

• Paragraph structure: including topic sentences, supporting evidence, the differences between summary and analysis, textual engagement, and paragraph transitions

• Organization: demonstrating strong paragraph development throughout the paper, including introduction and conclusion

Again, a student will not develop all of these skills simultaneously or at the same rate. That would simply be expecting too much. It’s more reasonable to concentrate on them in chronological order, focusing on reading comprehension first, and working through the list, as each skill becomes more natural and consistent in the student’s writing. Of course, students will always be practicing in all of these areas throughout the semester, but they should not expect improvement quickly across the board. Now that you have a list of the skills that you will be practicing during your semester of 100 or 100R, let’s look at how we will evaluate your acquisition of these skills.

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