Developing an authentic and effective grading system in a journalism class
Every year I struggle with how to grade my journalism students –– they all have different responsibilities and assignments, and there just isn’t an easy formula for grading all the things they do. Some students write, some take pictures, some design pages, some copyedit, and some lead and coordinate –– none of it translates easily into points. And to make it even harder, my school’s grading software is built around two main assumptions: one is that the entire class is doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, and the other is that everything accomplished in a classroom can be reduced to points in the first place.
And these aren’t the only problems. The generation of students I teach are so motivated by grades and points that they often see learning as the thing they do to get points rather than what they do naturally when they’re engaged in the world of ideas. While grades may be effective at forcing students to work on specific tasks, they are utterly ineffective at getting students to care about what they’re doing and at getting them to think critically and write effectively. When we reduce what we do in the journalism class to grades and points, there can be negative consequences that ripple their way through our publications.
I used to create rubrics for all the different types of assignments my students would do and apply the school’s grading scale to each story by assigning it a grade of A, B, or C based on the number of points it earned on the rubric. But I never liked this system –– the rubrics seemed more like a way to explain and justify a grade rather than a way to help a student become a better writer.
I also started recognizing that rubrics can have a damaging effect on students’ writing. When writers are given checklists of things to look for, that’s where all their focus goes, rather than on making sure that what they write is truly meaningful, filled with passion, and engaging to the audience. When rubrics rule the grading process, the underlying assumption is that all good stories are exactly the same. A writing teacher, and especially a journalism teacher, must see that every piece of writing, if it’s going to be engaging or effective or artistic, must be allowed to break out of any preconceived mold we teachers have for it.
What my journalism grading system has evolved into is a system that simply rewards students for the work they do. I now set out at the beginning of each term with a number of points I want students to earn during that period, and then I set some baseline values –– a story between 300-400 words is worth 100 points, a 50-100 word brief is worth 25 points, and photo shoots can be worth anywhere between 10 and 75 points based on how long they take and the challenge of the assignment. Rather than assigning a grade to a story or photo, I award points for completing it. And if a student writes a longer, more in-depth piece, I give it more points. The catch, though, is that I will only award points to a story or a photo after it’s been tagged as approved by an editor, and no points are awarded for work that doesn’t meet the class standard.
While I still dislike the idea of reducing work to points, I’ve found ways to embrace the arbitrary nature of points. I often have conversations with students about how many points something they did should be worth. Any time I’ve asked students how many points they should get for an assignment, the answer has always been reasonable.
When I have to turn in grades at mid-quarter or quarter breaks, I simply add a single entry in the school’s grading software for the number of points I expect by that period, and then I enter the total each student has earned. Whenever I enter these grades, I find that more than half of my students have exceeded my expectations, sometimes doing more than twice the amount of work I required.
The most important thing I do, though, to prevent grading from damaging the motivation of my students is that I consciously move it to the deep background of the class. It never enters our conversations as we plan and draft and revise our stories. We do those things because we love to do them; the grade is never why we work and why we write. Underneath it all, I want to teach my students that if they work hard and care about what they do, the grade will follow. And if they all get A’s, I’m absolutely fine with that.
I have found it also helps to assign points at set points during the semester for “good work habits.” This includes behaving professionally with each other and their sources, meeting standards of fairness and accuracy, and following ethical and legal guidelines. Weight it heavily enough that a serious violation — like plagiarism or having to write a major correction — will have a significant effect on the final grade.
Thank you – I really appreciate this post. I was recently (and unexpectedly) thrust into the role of newspaper adviser at my school. While I am growing to love the class – grading has also been one of my biggest struggles. In less than a year I’ve already burned through two grading systems and I’m contemplating a system like yours for next year. It seems simple and straightforward to implement this for the staff writers, but how do you assess what the editors are doing? Also, do the editor’s have an input on the assessment of the writers? And what about slackers? Do you have a policy to subtract points for missed deadlines? If you are able to share more specific information about your system I would be very grateful.
Hi Todd,
I’ve currently got a class for my writers and a class for my editors. The editors are all 2nd/3rd year students in my program, and I grade them differently than I do the writers. For the most part, the editors get A’s. Each editor has specific responsibilities — planning their section, guiding their writers, and publishing stories in both print and online. Because they have so many different things to do, I don’t have a way to grade them other than a work grade every two-three weeks. If they do their work, they get an A. Usually, my editors are willing to pitch in and do anything, and I think the fact that points/grades aren’t connected to specific tasks help — they feel like they own the publications and they’re proud of them, and that makes all the difference.
For my writer class, I give them a set number of points they have to earn as a minimum, and I stress that that number is the minimum. They get points for writing, photography, and graphic design. Sometimes we do little QA features and sometimes I need students to track people down for quotes — I award points for this too. A standard story for us 300-400 words, and this gets 100 points. We do a lot of briefs (50-100 words), and these get 25 points. If a student writes a longer, more in-depth story and gathers a lot of sidebar content, they can earn up to 200 points. Taking a quick picture is worth 10 points. Spending 15-30 minutes shooting for a story earns 25 points, and photo shoots that last an hour or two can earn up to 75 points. But I always try to stress that everyone pitches in when there’s work to do whether they’ve earned their points or not.
I set the number of points that the students need for any given quarter based on a few things — how many print issues we have coming out, how many stories we need for online, how stressed out students are. My requirement is usually around 100 points every two weeks. I’ve got some students, though, who earn more than 100 a week just because they’re having fun.
To hold the writers accountable, I don’t award the points until after a story has gone through the editing process where it’s been approved by their section editor and the EIC. I have really strong EICs who are some of the top writers in the school, and they hold the writers to pretty high standards — this has made my work a lot easier. If someone is short on points, they might get a low midterm grade — that usually motivates them to start working harder.
Because most of our focus is on our online publication, deadlines are more fluid than they are with a print publication. I have the editor and writer set a realistic deadline for an assignment, and if they need to change it, then I let them change it. I don’t take any points away for missing or changing deadlines.
I have a self grade and an editor grade factored into my final grades. Both are worth 10% of the total. I find that students fall into 2 categories, those that are honest and real about their self grades. Those kids usually give less points to themselves than I would have. And then there are the kids that give themselves a 100 for showing up. I put in whatever they write down. As far as editor grades go, I have every editor grade the people who were assigned to produce anything for their pages. Editors are harsh and they don’t give those grades freely. The other three components to my grading criteria are: deadline grades worth 30%, these are the 3-5 deadlines in the 6 week production cycle, final product grade worth 40%, this is my grade for them based on what they committed to do, what they completed, when they completed it, and how well they completed their tasks, and finally a 10% blog grade which is basically daily work like warm-ups and things I ask them to read no reflect upon on their personal blogs. My seniors have four years of these blogs. It isn’t perfect but in our system it seems to work. As we continue to branch into convergent media on our website, I will have to make modifications.
No surprise that in a sweep of the internet, looking for ideas on how to implement a grading change for a program that is rapidly growing, I hit on an article that hits every point I would like to say to my mentor/administrator more eloquently than I could.
Of course it is written by Jason!
Our whole school is on a standards based grading system, and I Associated Press Standards, Practices and Values straight out of their guidebook.
Until I read the above – I have been struggling as to how to translate the grades from work product to a grade.
Thank you for your insight.