The purpose of this class was for students to help each other confirm what is important about writing a good essay.
Students will use this Essay No.1 Self-Evaluation Sheet as a checklist for writing a good essay, and we went through some of the main points to see how their printed drafts were.
Obviously, the most important aspect of a good essay is 1) the meaningfulness of the topic and research question, 2) the depth of the research, and 3) the persuasiveness of the argument. I could easily give A, B, C grades based on my personal perception of whether a student has done well in those areas.
However, I prefer to give a point-based checklist because it is important for me that students know what is important for a good essay and can evaluate their own essay by themselves.
Designing a point-based rubric is difficult, and I always struggle with the weighting of points. For example, this time the item "Persuasiveness" is 6pts out of 20, but perhaps it should be 10pts out of 20. Also, I don't have an explicit item to give points for easy vs. difficult topics or meaningful vs. not so meaningful research questions. I have considered give that some weighting. Another questions is whether should I have a system to give extra points to students who struggled with some basic things such as constructing their argument, but made an outstanding effort to do research with academic English sources. At this point, all of those important areas are under the umbrella of "persuasiveness," while the other 14 points are given for in 1 or 2 or 3 point allocations for items such as formatting, organization, use of sources, and academic English.
It is difficult to know whether this system is best, so I hope to keep analyzing the effectiveness by asking students about and getting feedback from other teachers.
In any case, I hope the Self-Evaluation sheet helps students look at their essay with several key criteria in mind as they do the final checking and polishing for submission.
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