Post 5: Reflection on Teaching Blog, Revise and Resubmit

 Any academic who has tried to be published in a journal has probably gotten an R&R review: Revise and resubmit. 

In regard to all the assignments I had to asses (grade) this week, I gave a lot of R&R (translated) grades or feedback. 

Why? Because giving a F helps nobody. Because they need to do it right. They need to know that crappy work is not acceptable. We don't get by in life. 

Now, how to handle this is a matter for debate and discussion. Should they get a penalized grade for the R& R (not full credit for the revision)? How much time do they have? How many are they allowed? How do you decide it's worth it? Doesn't this make more work for the professor? 

Great questions. I would say there's a lot of wiggle room here. Maybe just one R and R allowed for the class (otherwise it creates a pattern). The professor can grade when he/she gets around to it. Only a few days for the revision to be submitted (it's overdue already).

As for more work, well, this is where the specs grading ideas come in. If you read the first paragraph of an essay, for instance, and it is clearly not doing what the assignment is supposed to do, why keep reading? If you are grading grammar and there are three fragments or runons in the first two paragraphs, why correct them repeatedly? Obviously the student didn't take care or use the tools available to them. 

This happened to me this week. I read two assignments out of 25. They were both solid Fs from negligence in writing in a writing course. I wasn't interested in reading a bunch of bad assignments. I told the whole class to R and R based on those two, gave them two extra days, and will start grading tomorrow, no mercy. No grace. Mercy has been extended already. Patience has its limits. (These are juniors and seniors at a college that has access to Grammarly Premium for free, so there is no reason for superficial errors.)

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