| Modified Point System for First-Year Composition |
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| In her article, "What Grades Do for Us, and How to Do without Them", Marcy Bauman describes an achievement-based grading system she used for one first-year composition course. Students were asked to: |
- Read and annotate about 200 pages of articles, culled (by them) from popular periodicals for the first half of the term and from scholarly sources for the second half
- Write one-page article recommendations (whose purpose is to convince others in the class to read the article they recommended) about once every other week (a total of five)
- Write one-page responses to articles which had been recommended by others (total of six)
- Produce a draft and final copy of a five- to seven-page typewritten, double-spaced midterm report
- Produce a draft and final copy of a five- to seven-page typewritten, double-spaced final report
- Write one-page responses for the authors of five to seven other midterm reports
- Write one-page responses for the authors of five to seven other final reports
- Write five 150-200-word "colleague acknowledgments": statements about the writing of classmates whose writing they respected
- Write a three- to five-page self-evaluation at the end of the semester
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| Anyone who completed all these assignments to the lengths specified earned an A. Anyone who completed 80 percent of the work (counted as total number of pages) earned a B. Seventy percent earned a C, etc. Missing a major assignment lowered the course grade by one letter. |
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| (from Stephen Tchudi, ed. Alternatives to Grading Student Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. 162-178.) |
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