I talked
about my House, M.D. marathon and diagnosing essays. All the parts connect, so
a true diagnosis for a single cause is difficult. Rubrics present themselves as
a way to accurately and speedily diagnose an essay, allowing the instructor to tick
off gradations in select categories while seeming to make in-depth comments
regarding the essay. The comments are supposed to allow a student to realize
the specific errors, then go back and correct the incorrect writing habits,
which produced the errors in the first place.
I’ve never come
across a rubric that could actually do this. The seemingly in-depth comments
are too vague and generalized to offer specific guidance. This is the reality
of rubrics as language applicable to a wide variety of situations and writing
must be employed. Rubrics, by their very nature, must be generalized. The
nature of a rubric itself also is to simply speed up the grading of essays,
making them into the equivalent of an optical mark reader such as the sciences
and mathematics enjoy.
To me a
rubric is the equivalent of saying “take it easy for a few days, don’t hurt
yourself, and you’ll be fine,” all the while the patient is suffering from
massive organ failure, but the doctor cannot be bothered to spend in-depth time
truly diagnosing and offer specific advice to the patient.
Why is it acceptable to tick off
marks on a rubric, slide some numbers around, and then come up with a grade?
The advice isn’t really valid or even prescriptive. The generalized meanings of
the comments don’t offer anything except adjectival differences between
“employs an adequately-constructed argument” and “employs a well-constructed
argument.” What’s the difference? What is the difference between an adequate
argument and a poor one, or an insufficient one?
Rather than spend time and energy
coming up with vague descriptors for a rubric, I would prefer to tailor my
comments specifically to the writer and the writing, offering concrete examples
using their writing on what they could do or what else they should consider.
This makes my grading time much longer, but it usually means, for the students
who want to improve, that they won’t undergo massive organ failure and flatline
at the end of the semester.