About Grading Conferences

• Anyone who likes to meet with the students one-on-one.
• Anyone who is comfortable assigning a grade with students present.
• Anyone who hates grading alone or procrastinates doing it.
• Anyone who likes to have their evenings and weekends free from grading pressures.
• Anyone who wants grading to be a more effective teaching tool.

• Grading becomes a teaching moment.
• Students pay attention to their writing when their grades are being discussed.
• Students understand exactly how their grade is being determined.
• Students get to see the affect their paper has on a reader.
• Students finally care what exactly a run-on, audience appeal, etc. are.
• Students get involved in assessing their own writing instead of looking only at the letter grade.
  

• Instructors can establish more rapport with the students.
• Instructors can feel like their comments are being heard and understood (and say more when the students don’t understand).
• Instructors don’t have to take as much work home with them.
• Instructors can’t as easily procrastinate grading.
• Instructors avoid the guilt of not doing grading or getting the papers back soon enough.

My Model (In addition to regular drafting conferences, I did grading conferences. I did not cancel class for the grading conferences; I did for the drafting conference.)

1. Set up 30-minute conference. Students bring two copies of final draft and all previous drafts and peer reviews (sometimes even sources).
2. The first half of the conference the student and instructor sit separately (reduces student anxiety) and complete grading rubric. (The instructor can make comments or ask questions about the paper during this process. The students sometimes ask about the grading rubric.)
3. The second half of the conference the student and instructor compare assessments and talk about differences and ways to improve (writing goals) for the next paper–of course, these can be agreed upon rankings in the assessment.
4. The instructor gives the grade for the paper. (I did not ask students to grade the paper overall, just assess individual components. I didn’t want to have them be ashamed if they ranked it higher.)
5. Instructor asks them if they have any questions or comments about the grade.

Alternate Model #1: Keep drafting conference and shorten grading conference.

1. Set up 5 to 10 minute-grading conference.
2. Instructor grades the paper before the conference.
3. Instructor discusses his/her response to the paper and writing goals for the next paper.
   

Alternate Model #2: Cancel drafting conferences and do only grading conferences.

Do I need to conduct a grading conference for every assignment? Are there some assignments for which this works better than others?

I wouldn’t do grading conferences for every assignment. However, if an assignment were given multiple times (I give a short annotated bibliography assignment for every paper), I would maybe do a grading conference the first time. I just found students learned so much the first time.

I would have a grading conference for the first major paper. I would also have one for the second paper and have it be optional for the third paper. I found that about 1/3 to1/2 of the students came to the last optional one–a pretty high turnout I thought, especially during finals and without class being cancelled.

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