When failing an assignment earns an A grade

Grades are incentives, so what do we incentivize when we grade?

Quick quiz: a student comes up to you and says “I realize that I don’t like writing fiction and that I want to quit.”

What do you say?

. . .

Last week, my answer to a student was “so, quit writing fiction.”

I suspect many teachers would have answered differently; indeed I know that I have previously responded to similar statements by encouraging the student to persevere and work through their struggles. However, my experiences this semester have caused me to reconsider my position.

To provide a little more context, prior to the fiction writing exercise I started the semester with a series of non-fiction readings and then asked students to “write in the style of . . .” (the books were Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Kincaid’s A Small Place). Most students liked two books but not the other, sparking good classroom conversations about the need for mature thinkers to think about ideas that challenge their own views and for mature writers to think about approaches that challenge their own style.

And in a number of cases, the students “failed” to accurately imitate the assigned mentor text. That is not my judgment; here’s a typical reflection from when students who were asked to rate their success on a 1–10 scale:

I think I replicated [Kincaid’s] style at about a 6. I struggled to not propose solutions, and I felt as if there were too many hypocrites [sic] in my work. I thought my voice sounded like hers (mine was a little more raw), and I followed her structure, however I found it difficult to get angry in the way she was, my angry writing would still propose solutions.

That was an accurate comment, and it raises the question of what grade to give the student? If I assess effort and reflection, then an A; if I assess accuracy, then a D. I gave an A, as I have for similar levels of effort and reflection all semester long, because that’s what I want to encourage.

Such comments suggest that my students are becoming self-aware writers, able to articulate their strengths and weaknesses. The comments also help offer me teachable moments. By way of example, below are sample comments and the specific writing moves that I reviewed in class and then had students work on inserting into their pieces:

Kincaid “I should have a larger range of sentence structures to compose my arguments. My work could use some editing of harsh language. (I think I could roar them more elegantly)”

• em dashes — where one places a thought in the middle of another thought like this-are useful
• Long sentences (with parenthetical asides)
• Rhetorical questions
• Anaphora
• Polysyndeton

Coates “I think that I wrote and expressed my ideas clearly like he does however I think I can use more of his sentence structure to imitate his style better.”

• Anaphora: “I, I, Our, Our, And, And”
• Asyndeton. Parataxis. Short clauses
• Describe–Comment
• “But . . .”

In terms of incentivizing effort and reflection, what to make of this comment:

On a scale from 1–10, my piece is probably a 4 in closeness to Coates. I personally am very happy with this piece, and I think that it is really expressive, but I think that I should change the subject/voice to make it more like Coates’s writing.

Again, the student offered an accurate reflection: a good piece of writing that failed to match the assignment criteria. In this case, I wanted to press the student to move beyond her usual writing style, and encouraged her to keep the original draft somewhere safe but show me some revisions that made her work more like Coates’ style. I told the student I wanted her to do this so that she might add a technique to her writer’s toolbox or to be able to articulate why she did not want to imitate a certain style in her writing.

Upon completing the assignment, the student offered this thoughtful reflection on why each writer’s style might be useful:

I think that Didion has a really masterful control/understanding of words and structures, which is good for essays to a more intellectual audience, and Kincaid was very blunt and passionate, which could be useful for passionate pieces towards/from more “normal people,” but Coates’s style is a really interesting combination between educated and honest, and it reads a lot like he is giving a speech or telling a story.

Once again, a student “failed” the assignment, but earned an A because of my decision to incentivize effort and reflection.

And so to return to the student whose question initiated this post. I don’t know that encouraging quitting should always be the answer, but, in this case, I think it was the correct decision.

This thoughtful student, who has already written three eloquent, moving personal essays for my class as well as earning good grades in her other classes and taking on significant and meaningful extra-curricular challenges, was offering an honest opinion of her feelings about this writing task. She had clearly made a good effort, per the assignment, to emulate her chosen mentor text but she knew she was done with this task.

I actually enjoyed reading her story, and had thought of ways for her to strengthen the character’s voice and develop the plot, but her statement caused me to question what assessment measures. Or, more accurately, what does assessment incentivize? A rubric always demands a student to complete an excellent piece of work if they want to earn the highest grade. But I know that the student is a strong writer and living a meaningful life, so who am I to insist that she complete this one task to earn a grade?

Therefore, I encouraged her to quit, which is sometimes the best decision, so as to continue to devote her energies to tasks that she cares about and move on from this one writing assignment.

Broadly, I take from this experience the need to consider a holistic view of my students’ needs when they come to me with a question or concern.

In terms of assessment, I am starting to re-think how I view assessment: having always seen it as something at the end of the writing process, I need to consider how my assessment shapes my students’ writing experiences throughout the process of composition, incentivizing my student writers towards effort and reflection.