The observations or even fears of digital technology-driven or -facilitated error patterns are merely the latest in

First, the assertion that new forms of communication signal the end of the world is nothing new.

The teacher’s view of student writing is but one voice among a chorus of peers.

Each of these three goals presents a helpful perspective on developing authors’ needs. An author’s ability to compose requires skill, understanding, and situational familiarity. None of those goals are met through a letter grade. Grades help label, sort, and rank students; they don’t inform students, target instruction, or encourage self-awareness.

A teacher should help students learn to assess quality fairly, to collaborate professionally, and to identify differences between their own work and model writing they wish to emulate. Writing classrooms can be laboratories in which students develop meaningful, relevant writing skills. If teachers stop grading student writing and instead focus on review and collaboration skills, each classroom would have a team of people qualified to assess the quality of writing. Teachers, then, could grade whether students provide beneficial peer review feedback and collaborate effectively—the meaningful work of writing.

if learning to work as/with peer reviewers provides insights into and feedback about writing performance, then the traditional structure of writing education is backward. If writing helps groups of people get things done, then students need to learn how to form, negotiate, and benefit from those groups. Grades get in the way, and teachers cannot guide students through their own writing, assessing, and reviewing processes if they are too distracted by issuing grades.

With all these systems of peer feedback already available to us, students need to learn to make use of them. Teachers could benefit from saved time and energy if they incorporated peer review systems of various flavors in their classes, reducing their workload and providing a variety of feedback for their students. Students, then, would learn to trust—and derive practical value from—the feedback of a real audience beyond their teacher. Writers who can peer review effectively become purposeful readers, thinking of texts, from classmates’ work to their textbooks, as devices used to achieve goals, rather than as static documents designed only to inform. The mantra that “you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet” makes rational sense but seems to fail us at crucial moments. Thinking critically about the things we read takes longer than clicking Like, retweeting, reblogging, or sharing; the efficiency of social tools discourages complex questioning that challenges and validates claims. In-class peer review helps writers think carefully about the implications of writing and the ways writing can help solve problems.

Instead, we should teach people how to improve their writing through peer review. Variations of peer review help us write in many of our day-to-day situations. We learn what sorts of text messages work best by observing how our friends text and respond to us. We learn what makes an effective email by reading the ones we get and responding or deleting as we see fit. We learn how best to craft Facebook posts by seeing what kinds of content can garner the most likes—at its heart a form of quick (and addictive) peer review. Consider, too, all of the review features available on websites such as Yelp, Amazon, LinkedIn, Angie’s List, and so on. Reviews offer feedback and critique by users/peers.

(1) determining whether students understand a concept well enough to implement it, (2) identifying elements of student writing that need improvement, and (3) helping students learn to better self-assess.

But how exactly does a letter count? How does it fit in with an overall view of a student’s ability? And more importantly, given the complexities of writing, how can one letter reflect the myriad

They learn how to write well by getting feedback from readers and from reading and analyzing examples of similar writing from other authors (such as their peers or professional authors writing the same type of material the students are writing).

Students don’t learn how to write from a grade.

but wouldn’t it be better to help writers develop the ability to independently assess the quality of writing, either theirs or other people’s? By expecting students to write so that teachers can rate, rank, and label them, we implicitly tell students that our satisfaction is more significant than their intrinsic aspirations. Writers should develop the purpose of their writing, rather than having it determined elsewhere. Students must learn that process through experience; grading will not teach them.

It puts the teacher in charge and abolishes the opportunity for students to learn how to evaluate quality. Writing in graded situations becomes writing for a grade, whereas writing in other circumstances seeks effectiveness as a standard. When students write for a grade, they come to see writing as transactional (given to someone in exchange for credit) rather than actionable (created with purpose and designed to achieve a goal).

as different graders notice different things within the same text. But when students have only one teacher in their classroom, and that one teacher’s assessment carries all the weight and authority, students learn to write for the teacher instead of expecting the writing to do anything on its own.

We need to help students become skilled reviewers of other people’s writing, a skill that is much more useful than learning to write to please the teacher.

in this text, grades are a fairly recent invention, in terms of the history of education. It would seem that grades have been imposed upon a system that had been getting along without them for hundreds of years. This imposition is a reductive one, replacing feedback, commentary, suggestions for improvement, and opportunity for discussion with merely a single letter or number. The idea of an A paper and giving numeric or alphabetic grades needs to end. Instead, we need to help students think of writing as adults do—in terms of inciting action and achieving goals.

When was the last time your writing was graded? Odds are, not since you left school. Since then, anything you’ve written had a specific purpose, and you worked on it until it met your goal. Maybe a colleague or manager decided when it was good enough, and maybe they even gave you feedback about what worked well or not, but you didn’t get a score, a letter grade, or have your writing ranked against your colleagues’ work. But for some reason, this scoring/ranking system has become the norm as a method of labeling the relative quality of student writing. The whole arrangement teaches students to write for an arbitrary measurement from an authority figure rather than for a real audience

In short, the enterprise of grading student writing should be replaced by a combination of formative and summative evaluation.

If I don’t submit a letter grade at the end of a semester, I will not have a job. But providing end-of-semester grades doesn’t preclude providing formative assessment that can help students revise a text or project so they will better understand why they might receive an 85% as a final grade

As grades lose their power, the desire to evade punishment or failure can dissolve into the desire to seek knowledge and learn something new.

Formative evaluation—done typically by responding to in-process student writing several times during the semester—replaces the punishment or praise of student learning, typically demonstrated

Grading is a silent, one-way evaluation, where a teacher assigns a letter, rife with a set of socio-cultural significances, to a piece of student writing

The arts, humanities, and English share think for oneself as a high-priority goal. In addition, the arts, of which writing (especially creative writing) might be considered a part, lists creativity as a top goal,

These terms, such as data, are not ones that writers use to describe or understand their own writing and learning. Writing instructors and administrators like me, especially those who use rubrics not only for grading but for assessing entire programs, are using tools with which we are not properly trained and that were designed for other academic disciplines and data-driven research. While rubrics may be moderately helpful in assessing a program on

A rubric suggests that the task and its goals are understood before the writing itself occurs and that writing works the same way for everyone every time

But a rubric is a set of preconceived parameters—designed before seeing the products of the task at hand— that applies across the board.

But what if you do x and y and b—and discover something you’d not known before and isn’t on the rubric? The rubric does not accommodate the unexpected.

the rubric’s simplicity implies that all writing can be fixed or corrected and that this correction can be done in the same way across pieces of written work and across students, instead of suggesting that revision—sometimes re-envisioning—is a more rewarding and fruitful step in becoming a better writer.

If one evaluates writing by looking for what’s wrong or what needs to be corrected or fixed, one misses potential and fails to point toward improvement in the future.

A rubric, then, is an odd way to simultaneously overcomplicate and oversimplify the way one looks at and judges a written text.

Instead of responding to writing in language—with oral or written feedback— many rubrics mechanize response

A Rube Goldberg machine is an overly engineered mechanism for a simple task. A rubric, by comparison, looks fancy and is often quantitative—it looks incredibly well engineered with its seemingly airtight checklist.