American U. Seminar Will Advise Faculty Not to Judge Writing Quality When Grading
“We must rethink how we assess writing, if we want to address the racism”
The theory here is that judging writing by its quality is somehow racist.
The College Fix reports:
University seminar teaches faculty not to judge ‘quality’ of writing when grading
American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.”
It’s led by Asao Inoue, a University of Washington-Tacoma professor, and the purpose is to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments.
A national scholarly organization that preaches its “commitment” to academic excellence came out swinging against the seminar, telling The College Fix that Inoue’s ideas are “destroying the very idea that composition classes should teach all students to write well.”
In an email, National Association of Scholars spokesperson Chance Layton said Inoue is “substituting social justice ideologues’ bigotry for instruction in composition”:
The national dominance of social justice educators such as Prof. Inoue indoctrinates college graduates nationwide into social justice ideology and bigotry–but fails to teach them how to write a coherent sentence.
Inoue’s publications on writing assessments suggest that he sees subconscious racism in standards, due to white students consistently outperforming black and Latino students.
“We must rethink how we assess writing, if we want to address the racism,” Inoue wrote in his 2015 book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.”
In another paper, “A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing,” Inoue argues that writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgements [sic] of quality when producing course grades.”
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Comments
It’s always the same. If the “right” people don’t meet the standards, then the standards are wrong.
As an added bonus, if you don’t score on quality, there’s no point in teaching quality. That leaves even more time for indoctrination!
Leftists win again!!
This is one of the reasons why I don’t teach college anymore. I taught argumentative writing and research. First, we were told not to grade too hard on grammar because it was racist. Then, we were told we couldn’t teach citation skills to freshmen because they were overwhelmed by it. My style being Socratic was cited as the reason a student complained that I was picking on her because I called on her in class and her hand wasn’t up. Writing skills have deteriorated to the point where students can’t form cogent sentences or write a coherent paragraph. The only students I had who were college ready were those who attended private school or were home schooled. Public school students were woefully unprepared. That was enough for me. I left and never looked back.
A variation on that theme: when trying to find pearsonnel for my growing department, I encountered many eager young people. The problem was that most of them could hardly compose cogent sentences verbally. The narrative on some résumés ws horrifying.
I finally had three working for me. Two reached a point where I accepted what they wrote in their reports with just a correction or two here and there for clarity. The third needed a lot of correctdive work. I will hand him this: he observed my corrections, and I saw quite an improvement in his work as the months went by.
Hey, let’s just skip the middle man altogether. Just mail the college 4 years of tuition (or if you don’t want to pay, prove that you’re some kind of victim and you’ll get life experience credits or something) and they can mail out a “diploma”.
No muss, no fuss. And just as valuable.
So . . . what is the purpose of the grade? If quality of work is no longer relevant, what does a grade indicate?
Bruthas jus be keepin it real.
To deny this to them is obviously racist.
If I hear one more student who did crappy work tell me (probably dishonestly, but whatevs), “But I worked really hard on it!” I will vomit.
Clearly the first step is to eliminate the Creative Writing departments. They seem to be a magnet for these types of “non-thinkers.”
“Everybody has won and all must have prizes,” said the Dodo. In Alice and Wonderland, of course.
Yet this is where preferences in admission must inevitably lead, as admitting students who struggle to do the work inevitably leads to attacks on academic standards that produce disparate outcomes.
Thus, dishonesty in one part of the university inevitably threatens the integrity of the entire enterprise.
Clearly, Lewis Carrol was a flaming racist and part of the oppressing white patriarchy.
/eyeroll
And a prescient one as well.
I guess those “old dead white men” weren’t all wrong…