Grading Writing

As we approach the end of the semester, one topic on many faculty members’ minds is undisclosed AI use. Whether you prohibit AI use entirely or place just a few limitations, you know that restricting AI use is easier said than done. Students may misuse AI in a number of ways that result in academic integrity violations, including using AI in ways prohibited by course policies or assignment directions; failing to adequately attribute their AI use; or using AI in ways that produce other academic integrity violations, such as misrepresentations of sources or fabricated citations.

If your writing has been subjected to academic peer review, you’ve likely experienced the scourge that is “Reviewer 2”: a reviewer who is uncharitable and nitpicky, cluttering one’s paper with irrelevant, unhelpful, or sanctimonious nastygrams concerned more with asserting their own expertise than helping strengthen your writing.

As we move towards the end of the semester, many faculty are feeling overwhelmed by the mounting stack of student writing awaiting their feedback. With this in mind, today, we’re offering tips for streamlining the process of giving feedback while actually boosting its effectiveness for students.

Generative AI has created some challenging new realities for instructors. While initial concerns focused on academic integrity and the risks of GenAI being used as a replacement for student work, emerging concerns are developing around the ways students may be differently impacted by these advances. Last fall, Indiana University was subject to media scrutiny and a lawsuit after its AI detection technology, Turnitin.com, systematically produced false positive results for work submitted by multilingual students.

Formative feedback is one of the most powerful ways for instructors to help students develop as learners and writers. By receiving early feedback on works in progress, students learn to revise based on advice from their readers and to actively consider how their intended audience might understand their work.

Research in teaching with writing consistently emphasizes the importance of early, formative feedback on writing as critical for students' growth as writers. Formative comments on works in progress can affirm effective writing choices, correct misconceptions and misunderstandings, and coach students on various improvements they can make to their written work. The labor of revising and extending their writing based on expert feedback provides some of the most engaging and practical lessons for developing writers.

Among the many reasons to assign collaborative or team-based writing to students is that it models the collaborative and team-oriented academic fields and workplace contexts where they hope to work. Three Minnesota researchers in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and colleagues from four other institutions recently described work in their discipline to promote meaningful authorship in massively multi-authored scientific papers.

Dark days; a wintery mix of rain, snow and ice; final projects; and grade submission deadlines—welcome to mid December! Many instructors, like their students, may be focused on the immediate present as they finish the last week of classes. The Spring Semester, like the spruces in Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man,” may be “rough in the distant glitter.” However, as we wrap up the semester, it can be helpful to take a few minutes to hear from our students about moments of success. 

The final weeks of the semester can be a period of frenzied production as students prepare drafts of their final projects—proposals, essays, presentations, etc.—with hopes of receiving guidance from their instructors and teaching assistants before turning in final versions. While intentionally scaffolded assignments can do much to support students through the process of completing a final project, they do not alleviate the need for timely feedback.

Many instructors know the benefits of reflective writing for promoting students’ conceptual understanding, encouraging student agency, and helping students transfer what they have learned to new contexts. At the same time, grading students' reflections can be challenging: when students report their personal, subjective reflections, doesn’t it make all grading subjective? How can we grade reflective work fairly?