Trying to Make the Untangible, tangible, the Elbow Way

I felt that this week's readings offered some truly tangible advice--the kind that I can slap into my back pocket and keep--and pertaining to an extremely vague and confusing subject: grading writing. In his piece "Good Enough Evaluation: An Overall View of When and How Evaluation Make Sense", I appreciated that Elbow immediately admits that there is no perfect system for grading writing, that it is incredibly subjective from grader to grader, and therefore, we should be prepared to accept a "good enough" model. As long as we want to teach writing--and I think it needs to be taught now more than maybe ever before--then we need a way to quantify it into a grade to justify it as a teachable course. And perhaps too offering tangible grades are important to contemporary students who live in a results-driven world where the grade is all that matters and the the grade is all they look for. This is unfortunate as writing is the definition of process, as opposed to results, but when the object of learning to write is to the process of improvement, at least in my mind, then perhaps grades offer the right incentive and map for students to do so. Even then Elbow offers some solid suggestions for some "good enough" compromises in how to achieve this. In the past I've been a fan of giving and receiving those long-winded criticisms and suggestions on papers followed by the grade that it "feels like". which Elbow mentions; however, now I can see their failings now in terms of generating tangible grading. Using a ruberic as Elbow emphasizes offers a tangible way to offer a solid score while giving teachers and students a way to account for specific criteria in writing. Elbow encourages the use of as many different points of criteria on a ruberic as possible as well as multiples sources if possible. He includes an example of multiple instructors being brought in to view portfolios, even using one who has had no contact with the class in order to generate an "objective" point of view (14). Though there are still an infinite amount of cracks in this system of grading something subjective, as Elbow asserts, as long as hard numbers and letter grades are important, then we will need a system that works at least "good enough"