Holistic Scoring

While reading this chapter, I was invigorated to find a scoring method that involves student-driven evaluation. Instead of teachers alone deciding what makes quality writing, students are integral in laying out the requirements. While a lot of the discussion focuses on one, very specific method of rubric-creation, it is democratic and modern.

When instructors train students how to evaluate one another's writing, they will be better equipt to understand the downfalls and successes within their own writing. They are also held more responsible for their own learning overall. Holistic scoring is especially effective with writing workshops because students enjoy the control over their writing processes. The holistic approach also removes teachers from the domineering grade-giver title and moves him or her into a position of coach, leader, and resource provider.

While it wouldn't make sense to simply reinterate everything in the chapter, I'd like to emphasize some of the issues I found with this method. While it does promote classroom involvement with grading, it also seems like an easy 'opt out' choice for instructors who aren't all that interested in grading their students work. It seems lazy, in a way, to allow students to take over the teacher's obligations. As the instructor, they have the experience and background knowledge to grade appropriately.

In an ideal setting, students would be interested in administering fair, objective grades to one another. More realistically though, students would give grades based on friendships, interest in the topic, or the mood they are in that day. Teenagers are distractable, emotional, and often selfish- too much so to be all that interested in grading papers.

While the holistic approach is appropriate for giving students more in a lesson than paper-writing skills, it is based on ideal principles that an instructor may not be able to implement effectively.