Grading Strategies

The work students do for the Business & Technical Writing courses is fairly defined. It is, after all, writing that is supposed to conform to current conventions within the business and technical writing communities. The instructor's responsibility is to evaluate the work students complete in a manner that is fair and informative to the students. On this page some grading strategies used by instructors who have taught Business & Technical Writing courses are offered.

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Since the difficulty of the assignments will vary, it is important to assign weighted values to the work. Here is an approach used in Technical Writing Essentials (355:202). It can be adapted for several other Business & Technical Writing courses.

Assigning Values to Assignments

Grading Procedures

The work of the semester will fall into three categories:

• Technical Writing Basics will help you think about audience, and the process and style aspects of technical writing.
  
  
• Technical Writing Techniques will give you chance to learn key elements of form and content that are typically found in short, medium, and long technical writings.
  
  
• Technical Writing Applications will give you chance to apply the basics and techniques as you develop a variety of technical writing documents.

Each assignment has a designated number of points to be earned. The point values (shown in Table 1 below) generally reflect the difficulty of the assignments. The points earned can be converted to percentages and then to letter grades. Table 2 shows the letter grade ranges for percentages. The math work is fairly simple!

Individual instructors may want to modify the assignment list or the point values. This is certainly possible to do, especially if the modification improves the overall value of the class for students. Since the tables below are also on the course Web page that students view, any changes an instructor makes needs to be announced to the class in order to avoid any misunderstanding. Feedback to Michael Goeller about the merits of the point system are sought.

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Another point system for grading can be seen on the Writing for Engineers Web page. It's a very extensive system that probably would not be developed by an instructor teaching a course for the first time. The system does, however, have important concepts that can be followed by any instructor. What follows is the introduction section from the Writing for Engineers grading page. As you will note, an effort is made to create somewhat of a "contract" between the instructor and the students. Doing so enables the grading to have fairness based on a fairly strong degree of objectivity. Students taking the Business & Technical Writing classes tend to like this approach.

Grading for Writing for Engineers (355:322)

The grading criteria for assignments in the Writing for Engineers course are intended to promote fair and relatively uniform standards for evaluating the work students submit. These standards are important because they tell students what will be expected of them and enable students to evaluate their own work as it is being done. There are 11 assignments that will be graded during the semester:

These assignments constitute all of the work that is done in the course. Two assignments will be entirely completed in class; others will be organized and/or started in class and finished independently. Writings will be collected, commented upon, and returned to help students prepare for the writing demands typically experienced in the engineering profession. Students also need to participate in collaborative activities involving discussion of assigned readings, peer review of drafts, and development of a user manual. The class, in fact, is in many ways a writing lab. Thus,attendance is crucial; without the practice and participation, students will have difficulty meeting the criteria for the assignments. There is also the matter of timeliness. Engineering work is typically done within a business environment. There will always be demands to complete high quality work within specific time frames and penalties imposed for not doing so.

The Technical Proposal is the major assignment for the semester. As such, a passing grade must be earned on this assignment in order to earn a passing grade for the semester.

Each assignment has a number of points that will be earned by completing the required elements. Points earned will then be converted to percentages that correspond to letter grade ranges -- See the following table.

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