Marking a Class 7 description with nothing but penalties
Farah teaches English as Language II to Class 7 with 44 students. Her term task was a 120-word description of 'a person I admire'. She used an inherited scheme: 0.5 mark deducted for each spelling error, 0.5 for each grammatical error, 3 marks for reaching 120 words, and no separate marks for content or organisation. The class average was 6.5 out of 15. The liveliest piece, by a boy who joined this year from an Urdu-medium school, described his mother's vegetable shop - the early mornings, the weighing scale, a customer who argues - but had 14 spelling errors, six verb-tense slips, and ran to 96 words; it scored 4. Two of the highest scorers wrote exactly 120 words with almost no errors and no detail beyond 'she is very hardworking and kind'. Three parents have asked why children 'who write so much' are getting low marks.
1. What does this scheme actually measure, and what does it fail to measure? Explain the score pattern, including why the two 'good' pieces got such different marks.
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It measures proofreading, not writing. Every mark is a penalty on surface features plus a length bonus; content, organisation and sense of audience carry zero weight. Three consequences are visible in the data.
The ceiling. Two students reached 120 words with minimal errors precisely by avoiding risk. 'She is very hardworking and kind' is not a description; it is a safe sentence. The scheme rewarded them for staying inside what they could already control.
The floor. The boy's piece holds the only real description in the class - the weighing scale, the arguing customer - and 96 words. At 0.5 per error it lost 10 marks on 14 spelling and six tense errors, plus 0 for length. His 4/15 says 'you write badly'; the truthful statement is 'your spelling and tense control need work, and your observation is excellent'.
The average. 6.5/15 is arithmetic, not information. A scheme in which deductions can exceed the content marks tells you nothing about what the class can do.
The parents are reading the marks correctly. The instrument needs replacing, not the children. Note also that the length bonus gives an advantage to fluent writers that has nothing to do with the quality of description.
2. Redesign the marking with weights and descriptors, and state exactly what mark and feedback the boy's piece should receive.
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Four criteria, total 15:
- Content and detail - 5: at least three specific, observable details about the person.
- Organisation - 4: an opening that names the person, grouped details, a closing that says why they are admired.
- Language range and accuracy - 4: sentence variety and tense consistency; spelling counted as a band (0 errors = 4; 1–4 = 3; 5–9 = 2; 10+ = 1) so one bad day does not collapse the mark.
- Task fulfilment - 2: near 120 words and addressed to a reader.
His piece: content 5, organisation 3, language 2, task fulfilment 1 = 11/15, with feedback on a separate slip naming two strengths (the weighing scale, the arguing customer) and one next step (past-tense endings; ten words taken from his own draft to learn). Do not return a page covered in red.
Then re-mark the two safe pieces honestly under the same rubric - they should fall to about 8 - and tell the class why before returning anything. If the rubric is not applied to the strong students too, it will look like a favour to the weak, and the class will read it that way.
3. Should length be a criterion at all? How should Farah answer the parents without simply inflating marks?
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Length is a proxy for nothing. It rewards padding and punishes the child who says it in 90 words. Keep it only as a small task-fulfilment mark tied to 'enough detail for the reader', not to a word count, and never deduct twice - once for being short and again for having fewer chances to make errors. Where a minimum length is needed for the examination, teach expansion as a skill ('add one more sense detail, one line of speech') rather than as a rule.
To the parents, show the rubric and two anonymised pieces. Explain that marks changed because the school now assesses content and organisation as well as spelling, and that writing a lot earns marks only when the detail is specific. Offer ten minutes at the next PTM where they read their own child's piece against the rubric.
Do not inflate the marks to settle the complaint; that destroys the only signal the class has about what good writing looks like. Keep old and new marks side by side on each child's sheet for one term so the change is visible and honest, and tell the head teacher before the results go home, so the explanation is not Farah's alone.