Grading technical papers during student conferences

Abstract

Engineering, technology, and technical communication professors who promote writing excellence in their classrooms face the age-old problem of handling the paper load. On the one hand, professors want to include more writing assignments. On the other hand, they must find enough time to grade the extra papers. One efficient and effective way to grade writing is in an individual conference with each student. For her classes, the author has adapted the individual conference method of Roger Garrison (1981) to use in on-the-spot grading with a grading scale. This method offers many benefits, the most important being that it is a powerful teaching tool rather than just a tool for assessment. The individual conference can be used not only to grade, but to discuss an already graded paper and to discuss numerous drafts before grading a final draft.