[Englecturers] Workload Committee

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

Cynthia, Ben, Stephanie, et. al.:

       My only word of caution about grading exercises for administrators 
is that they can backfire unless there is some sort of norming 
beforehand.  (Cynthia may have anticipated this need by proposing the 
assembly of packets with high, middle, and low papers.)  In the absence of 
preliminary norming, the process becomes scattered (as a famous study of 
instructors' grading biases in various disciplines has shown), and can 
easily undermine the idea that the evaluation of essays is something more 
than the exercise of each graders' idiosyncrasies.

John



sAt 09:31 AM 6/13/2005, you wrote:
>Stephanie, If the VC is asking for a "purely descriptive" report, I'm 
>wondering if a sort of "day in the life" would be doable? In particular, 
>could we ask the VC to look at and comment on some student work? Get into 
>the real nitty gritty of what we do every day, and see how much time and 
>attention we have to bring to our tasks?
>
>Maybe three papers, one very weak, the student needing help to bring it to 
>a minimally satisfactory level. Let the VC take some time to figure out 
>how you tell a student her examples don't support her point when she's not 
>sure what an example is not to mention what her point is; that her 
>organization is incoherent when she doesn't know what coherence is; that 
>her sentence is ungrammatical when she doesn't know etc....... And then 
>how you get her from that point to something acceptable.
>
>Second paper, a middling one, a low "C" maybe. How do you get this student 
>to say something more interesting; to work himself out of a muddled 
>paragraph, an obscure sentence, a structure lacking clear purpose; how do 
>you build his vocabulary not just of words but of concepts and logics?
>
>Third paper, a good one, but not an excellent one. What do you say to this 
>student to get her to see the possibilities in her own ideas?  Etc.
>
>And multiply that by twenty. Plus preparing lesson plans, and so on and so on.
>
>Perhaps the VC would find this effort tiresome.... Maybe he/she wouldn't 
>even try.... I get discouraged myself.  I am so grateful to you, Ben, and 
>Linda for taking this on and fighting for us and our students.
>
>Cynthia Tuell
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