For teachers, grading students’ essay might be something mundane to their everyday life. The school system commonly rely to teachers’ authority in grading students’ essay. However, it is becoming more common to this day that the students also take part in grading essays through peer review activity. Hence, it is essential for both teachers and students to understand the best way to grade an essay in these days. Every assessment obviousl has its own rubric score as a guide to grade the task. Similarly, in grading an essay, there will always be scoring rubric as a guide on what needs to be assessed and scored in an essay. When it comes to grade an essay, we need to know some important scoring categories to include in the assessment. No doubt, the best way to grading an essay is to assess the following elements in order: purpose and audience, ideas organization, structure and mechanics, vocabulary, and citing source.
How the essay fits the purpose and the targeted audience
First, you will need to pay attention and grade on how the essay fits the purpose and the targeted audience. Commonly, every essay will have its own purpose and audience. For example, the purpose of persuasive essay is to persuade its audience to do something, the purpose of descriptive essay is to describe something or someone, and so on. The best way to grade an essay is to assess how it fits the purpose of the essay. Generally, an essay can be considered as decent when the writing engages with the audience and contains an insightful awareness of audiences as well as presenting a meaningful purpose for the audience.
How to organize the ideas
Second, look closely to how the writer organize the ideas. Every essay will contains several main ideas since each paragraph has its own main ideas. When the writer is capable to articulate the ideas proficiently, readers will also capable in understanding the content of the essay and the direction of the discussion presented in the essay. Another essential element to consider is the way the writer elaborate the supporting details and the development of the discussion in the essay. Overall, the second element to asses in grading an essay is the organization, where the writer is expected to organize the ideas and all details clearly and coherently.
Examine how to structure
Third, when you need to grade an essay, examine how the writer structure the sentences and apply the mechanics of writing. What it means by sentence structure is the way the writer connect and correlate each sentence effectively and powerfully. It would also be better when the sentence style is not monoton but rich with well-chosen variety of styles and length. On the other hand, the essay should also be graded based on the mechanics of writing, such as the accuracy of punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and assigned format.
Exceptional vocabulary
Fourth, you will also need to grade the essay based on the vocabulary and the citing sources used in the writing. Depends on the proficiency level, writer is always expected to demonstrate certain level of vocabulary mastery through their writing. For example, university students are expected to demonstrate exceptional vocabulary range with high accuracy and effective use of words. On the other hand, junior highschool students won’t be expected to do so, instead they will be expected to demonstrate a specific range of vocabulary use, such as some adjective to describe people and such, according to their level of proficiency. Hence, it is important to understand the standard of vocabulary mastery used to grade an essay before you eventually grab the scoring rubric and start grading the essay.
Examining all the elements
Last, after examining all the elements mentioned as above, do not forget to grade the essay based on the citing sources. Remember that in higher level of writing proficiency, citing source is considered to be one of the most essential element in writing as it makes an essay to be valid and reliable to read. When you need to grade citation in an essay, make sure that all quotation is properly cited and appropriately included in the references list. It is also important to see the relevancy of the source cited in the essay with the whole argument or discussion presented in the essay.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the best way to grading an essay is to examine every elements in its writing. Commonly, there are some general categorization of writing elements associated in scoring rubric to grade an essay, which are purpose and audience, ideas organization, structure and mechanics, vocabulary, and citing source. Grading an essay based on these elements will give us clear result on the quality of the essay. Nevertheless, there might be another element of writing that needs to be graded based on different requirements in the assignment.
By: TYAS PUTRI AISTYANA
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