Evaluation: The Process for Revision

In the area of measurement of growth and proficiency in writing, one of the major difficulties has always been that word "measurement."Few of us in the English teaching profession feel comfortable with the associations of precision and icy objectivity that accompany the word "measurement," and most of us were brought up thinking you can't "measure" writing.All of us have been "grading" essays for years-by which I mean doing a range of things from simply saying "uh huh" to students as we hand back their virginal papers, to actually granting two or three letter grades and obliterating their text with such strange glyphs as "awk", "punc", "frag", "dang", and "rewrite by Friday."A major advantage to the word "grading" seems to be that it supports the widespread feeling among too many of us that standards for evaluation of writing are somewhat personal.We are all very careful to respect each other's right to a private grading system, even if it is arbitrary, wrong-headed, nasty, or capricious.Criticizing a colleague's values in this area is academically equivalent to crossing a picket line.In such an atomistic climate there has been little room for the idea of measurement because we have assured ourselves that there are no shared units of quality, there is no bureau of standards.Proficiency in writing in this climate is expressed as a letter grade, and growth can only be expressed as an improvement in grade.The fact that a writer can improve his writing between his freshman and sophomore years, but receive a lower grade because his second teacher holds different views from the first, bothers no one but the poor student.Nor do we seem particularly concerned about the fact, easily borne out in a number of studies, that our.own grades are subject to many kinds of bias, and fluctuate randomly in ways that few of us can control.