Blog # 8 - Yancey & Bean

Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-First Century by Kathleen Blake Yancey & Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria by John C. Bean

In the beginning of the essay, Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-First Century by Kathleen Blake Yancey, the author talked about assessment for students. She shared that compositionists often find themselves at the odds with writing assessment and frustrated with it. This showing that assessment is not their favorite task. Yancey presents a summary in her essay about the writing assessment. This history shared that students have been assessed through testing, on the writing process, and the attention to multiple texts, the way those texts are read.

Yancey also talked about students portfolios later in her essay. She talked about digital and printed portfolios. As she talked about this, I remembered a class I took when I first came to Kean.  There, we were asked to create a digital portfolio. Back then, it was explained to us that it was a class project but that we could use that portfolio to apply for jobs as well. The professor explained that the portfolio was a way to show potential employers part of our work. I didn’t really understood then what was the importance of it. After that class, creating portfolios was not a common task we were asked to do in other classes so I just simply didn’t go back to that portfolio I created. I think we were asked to reflect on our work for that portfolio and I also think we had several drafts of the same essay included on the portfolio. I think that overall, the portfolio was good to do in class. But I think that if we were asked to do them in several classes rather than in only a few, I would’ve been able to get more familiar with them.

I appreciated that Yancey’s essay was more up to date, this way I was able to more easily understand the points she was trying to make.

Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria by John C. Bean was an essay that talked about the usage of rubrics for grading. Bean states that “as teachers, our goal is to maximize the help we give students while keeping our own workloads manageable.” I’ve often heard teachers say that they spend a lot of time grading papers. Using rubrics seems to be a helpful tool for them. But as a student, I’m not sure how I feel about rubrics. I don’t hate them, but they are not my favorite either. I feel like rubrics can be so dry at times. They have so much information that it seems like it covers everything a student could wonder about how they’ll be graded. Yet, they often make me feel like I have questions after I read them. I often have to go back and ask my professors questions about the rubric so that I’ll have a better understanding of how I’ll be graded.   

I’ve never had a deep connection with rubrics. I’ve understood what they were going to be used for, followed them and found them important. I feel like a professor could easily say “I used the same rubric for all students, I posted it online, I went over it with you” so there shouldn’t really be a problem when it comes to how the students feels about how they were graded. The professor wouldn’t be wrong in saying this. But at the same time, I wonder how those rubrics could really say how each student will be graded. Rubrics are not always specific and the teachers need to clarify what it is said in them. This makes me think that they are a helpful tool but perhaps not always the best one for students.