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Contracts
A completely different approach to evaluation focuses less on the qualities of texts and the judgments of readers and more on students’ behavior as writers and students. Contract grading systems spell out all the work and activity that students need to do for a particular assignment and base evaluation primarily on completion of that work. Thus, the focus for the teacher becomes not making discriminations about the quality of different student texts but rewarding students’ practice and improvement.
Here’s a sample contract that Prof. Peter Elbow has used at UMass Amherst.
A Contract for a Final Grade of B in First-Year Writing
To students in my first year writing course,
Imagine that this weren't an official course for credit at UMass, but instead that you had all seen my advertisement in the paper and were freely coming to my home studio for a class in painting or cooking. We would have classes or workshops or lessons, but there would be no official grading. Of course I'd give you evaluative feedback now and then, pointing out where you’ve done well and where I could suggest an improvement. But I wouldn't put grades on your individual paintings or omelets or give you an official grade for the course.
I believe that a home-studio situation is more conducive to learning than the one we have in this course – where many of you are not here by choice and I am obliged to give an official University grade. Therefore, I will try to approximate the evaluative conditions of a home studio course. That is, I will try to create a culture of support: a culture where you and I function as allies rather than adversaries and where you cooperate with classmates rather than compete with them.
Conventional grading often leads students to think more about grades than about writing; to worry more about pleasing me or psyching me out than about figuring out what you really want to say or how you want to say it; to be reluctant to take risks with your writing; sometimes even to feel you are working against me or having to hide part of yourselves from me.
For these reasons, I am using a kind of contract for grading. I will give you plenty of feedback on much of your writing. But I will not put grades on your papers and my comments will have no effect on your final grade for the course – up to the grade of B.
You are guaranteed a final grade of B if you:
(1) attend class regularly and be in class on time. Don't miss more than one week's worth of classes. And don't be habitually late. (If you are late or miss a class, you are still responsible for finding out what assignments were made.)
(2) meet due dates. Don't have more than one late major assignment and one late smaller assignment.
(3) participate in all in-class exercises and activities and complete all informal, low stakes writing assignments. Keep up your journal writing.
(4) give thoughtful peer feedback during class workshops and work faithfully with your group on other collaborative tasks. Work cooperatively in groups. Be willing to share some of your writing, to listen supportively to the writing of others and, when called for, give full and thoughtful responses.
(5) attend required conferences with me to discuss your drafts.
(6)sustain effort and investment on each draft of all papers. Always include your process letter, all previous notes and drafts, and all feedback you got.
(7) make substantive revisions. When the assignment is to revise, don't just correct or touch up. Your revision needs to reshape or extend or complicate or substantially clarify your ideas--or relate your ideas to new things. Revisions don't have to be better, but they must be different.
(8) copy-edit all final revisions of main assignments until they conform to the conventions of edited, revised English. When the assignment is for the final publication draft, your paper must be well copy edited--that is, free from virtually all mistakes in spelling and grammar. It's fine to get help in copy editing. (Copy editing doesn’t count on early and mid-process drafts.)
(9) find some genuine question or perplexity for every paper. That is, don't just tell four obvious reasons why dishonesty is bad or why democracy is good. Root your paper in a felt question about honesty or democracy--a problem or an itch that itches you. (By the way, this is a crucial skill to learn for success in college: how to find a question that interests you--even in a boring assignment.)
(10) think. Having found a perplexity, then use your paper to do some figuring-out. Make some intellectual gears turn. Thus your paper needs to move or go somewhere--needs to have a line of thinking.
Don't let these last two conditions bother you. I don’t ask that your essays always be tidy, well organized, and perfectly unified. I care more about working through the question than about finding a neat answer. It's okay if your essays have some loose ends, some signs of struggle--especially in early drafts. But lack of unity or neatness needs to reflect effort, not lack of effort.
Getting an A/B or A: As you see, the grade of B depends on behaviors. Grades of A or A/B, however, depend on quality. Thus you earn a B if you put in good time and effort; I will push you all to get a B. But to get an A or A/B, you have to make your time and effort pay off into writing of genuine excellence (and also meet the conditions for a B). Notice that for grades up to B, you don't have to worry about my judgment or my standards of excellence; for higher grades you do. But we'll have class discussions about excellence in writing and usually we can reach fairly good agreement. Your mid-semester and final portfolios will play a big role in decisions about excellence.
Knowing where you stand: This system is better than regular grading for giving you a clear idea of what your final grade looks like at any moment. For whenever I give you feedback on any major assignment, I will tell you clearly if you have somehow failed to satisfy the contract for a B. I will also tell you if I judge your draft to be genuinely excellent and thus to exceed the contract for a B. As for absences and lateness, you'll have to keep track of them, but you can check with me any time.
Grades lower than B: I hope no one will aim for lower grades. The quickest way to slide to a C, D, or F is to miss classes and show up without assignments. This much is nonnegotiable: you are not eligible for a passing grade of D unless you have attended at least 11 of the 14 weeks worth of classes, and completed 90% of the assignments. And you can't just turn in all the late work at the end. If you are missing classes and behind in work, please stay in touch with me about your chances of passing the course.
See also “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching” by Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow, forthcoming in CCC.
To return to the list of systems for evaluating student writing, click here.
To return to the article on Evaluating Student Writing, click here.
Updated September 3, 2008
