Teacher Resources: Grading Criteria

Reasons why a paper might not pass:

• PROJECT
  • The paper has no clear or emerging project. It may work with the readings through reference, paraphrase, or quotation, but it provides no indication of how these moments of textual work contribute to a larger point or position in the paper.
  • Alternately a paper may have a project, but rely too heavily on summary and fail to engage responsibly with textual evidence.
    
• WORKING WITH TEXT
• Although the paper may make reference to the issues raised by the assignment question, it does not engage with the assigned readings and does not work effectively with text. It privileges the student's ideas without being responsible to the readings or privileges the readings without linking them to the project.
• The paper does not follow through on relations the student tries to establish between his or her own position and the readings, or between the readings themselves.
• Although the paper indicates that the student has done the reading in a general sense, it demonstrates a lack of basic reading comprehension, or a failure to grasp the outline of an assigned author's argument.
• The paper over-generalizes about the assigned reading, or depends largely on summary of the assigned reading that is not pertinent to the assignment question.
  
• ORGANIZATION
  • It may have too little coherence from paragraph to paragraph, or it may lack an organizational structure. Use of paragraphs may be weak.
    
• PRESENTATION
  • The paper has significant sentence-level error that makes it difficult to follow. Serious patterns of error might include sentence integrity, verb agreement, and number agreement. Less serious patterns, including misused apostrophe and other spelling errors, can contribute to a paper earning a NP, especially when they occur with high frequency. Alternatively, students may fail to proofread their papers, possibly resulting in errors that they may be able to correct on their own. In either case, if a student's errors are so numerous or severe that they impede meaning, the student should not pass.

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