Faculty as Participants in the Junior Writing Portfolio
Any instructor who signs off on a paper for a student's Junior Writing Portfolio participates in the Junior Writing Portfolio evaluation. If you teach undergraduates and assign writing in your courses, then sooner or later you will operate as a Junior Writing Portfolio rater. The information on this sheet is designed to help you understand and perform that function within the intentions of the Junior Writing Portfolio examination procedure.
When complete, a student's Junior Writing Portfolio contains five examples of writing ...
- Three papers written as course assignments. Each paper has a cover sheet signed by the teacher of the course, deeming the paper as "acceptable" or "outstanding" according to the standards of the course and the field. A student is required to submit three papers from three different courses. These three teachers act as the first round of evaluation of the student's portfolio.
- Two essays composed under timed and proctored conditions: one a 90-minute argumentation, the other a 30-minute self-evaluation. These two essays are evaluated by trained WSU faculty who have consistently assigned writing submitted by students in their Junior Writing Portfolios. When the evaluators of the timed essays have any doubt about the student's readiness for writing in upper-division courses, particularly [M] Courses, the entire portfolio--timed essays and class essays together--is evaluated, in full, by trained and experienced WSU faculty Portfolio readers.
The instructor of any course from which a student submits a paper participates in the evaluation process of the Junior Writing Portfolio.
Individual instructors serve a need that no one else can meet. As the teachers of the course, they are specialists with inside knowledge of the assignment, with experience in the range of student performance in the course, and with understanding of the rhetorical standards of the field. The judgment of this teacher is influential in the subsequent evaluation of the entire Junior Writing Portfolio. For instance, if the timed essay reader decides that the two timed-writing pieces are acceptable, then the entire Portfolio is deemed a Pass on the assumption that the individual instructors will not have allowed unacceptable pieces to be included. Also, evaluators of the entire Junior Writing Portfolio automatically consider a Portfolio for Pass with Distinction rating when all three of the course papers have been judged "outstanding" by the instructors.
The evaluation of individual course papers by WSU faculty is central to the instructional function of the WSU Writing Portfolio requirement.
It is an opportunity for students and instructors to discuss the importance of writing within fields, for instructors to promote writing in their profession, and to foster further improvement in writing with students.
The task of the individual course instructors
Evaluating a piece of writing for the portfolio may require one visit of the student and only a few minutes of the instructor's time, or it may require several visits and several readings. The basic tasks of the instructor are ...
- To assure that the paper submitted by the student was indeed assigned in the class, and to review it for possible inclusion in the student's Junior Writing Portfolio.
- To rate it as "outstanding" or "acceptable," or to reject it as not acceptable. (Note: instructor's may give a student the option to revise an unacceptable paper until it meets the instructor's standards for a rating of acceptable).
- To mark the rating on the cover sheet and sign off on the sheet.
- To initial a number of pages if the paper is clean copy, without instructor marks. This safeguard against plagiarized submissions is important. The WSU Writing Assessment office will not take an uninitialed clean copy even when accompanied with a cover sheet duly signed by an instructor.
Criteria for course paper submissions to the Junior Writing Portfolio
When is a paper submitted to an instructor for the Junior Writing Portfolio not suitable? When is it "outstanding?" These questions about Junior Writing Portfolio standards are crucial, since in several ways the instructor's decision is taken at face value during the evaluation process. Whatever an instructor has deemed suitable for inclusion in the portfolio of a student remains--the timed essay raters and the raters of the entire Junior Writing Portfolio never require a student to replace a course paper. Judgments of "outstanding" also help qualify a completed Portfolio for consideration as "Pass with Distinction." On the other hand, if instructors allow course papers of poor quality into the Junior Writing Portfolios, the students become all the more likely to receive a "Needs Work" decision. Standardizing instructor ratings is not easy. A major reason for the presence of instructor ratings in the WSU Junior Writing Portfolio, and the weight given them, is the recognition that writing criteria vary from discipline to discipline, genre to genre, course to course, and assignment to assignment. There are, however, four basic criteria that may apply universally to Junior Writing Portfolio course submissions.
Authorship The paper must show the mark of the writer's own labor, critical judgment, and rhetorical shaping. An instructor should reject, for instance, a piece that betrays unacknowledged or unassimilated borrowing from other authors or excessive dependence on student co-authors.
Appearance The paper should show a basic awareness of discourse conventions of the field and the genre, in terms of format, copy-editing, documentation, and so on.
Rhetorical effect The paper should be judged not just on content alone but also on the rhetorical means by which that content is conveyed to readers--for instance, on wording, sentence shape, flow, emphasis, arrangement of information and argument. A paper originally graded "A" on the basis of its content, may be so poorly written that it is unacceptable for inclusion in the portfolio.
Substantiality Ideally, the paper should have enough discursive text to demonstrate proficient writing ability for the given assignment and field of study.
The rating of "Outstanding" should be reserved for papers that truly stand out from typical undergraduate production, papers that instructors imagine colleagues in their field would recognize as unusually well written within the parameters of the assignment, the course, and the discipline.
Advice for Tier-I Readers (Instructors)
Rating potential submissions for the Junior Writing Portfolio should not take much time for instructors. Ways to make the process both convenient and effective are ...
- Announce to a class when you make a writing assignment that you are willing to consider responses to it for Junior Writing Portfolio submission. Also announce that students should bring their paper to you for your rating during the course, not afterward. That way students will not have trouble trying to meet with you semesters later over a paper you can barely remember.
- Modify writing assignments to help students meet their Junior Writing Portfolio requirements. For instance, to make up one Portfolio submission from a course, a student could submit two or three brief papers together with an essay explaining how the papers form a sequence.
- Use the Junior Writing Portfolio evaluation as a way to get students to revise their writing for the better. It is easy to tell a student that you will accept a paper if certain improvements are made.
- Encourage students to submit the original copy of papers. Evaluators of the entire portfolio use instructor's comments on papers, almost always to the benefit of the student. Instructor comments often direct the attention of readers to particular disciplinary concerns and conventions of which they are not aware.
- Don't let the original grade you gave to a paper coerce you into accepting a poorly written paper for Junior Writing Portfolio submission. It may jeopardize the student later when the full Junior Writing Portfolio is read. It makes perfect sense to say to the student that the original grade largely reflected content and not the quality of the writing per se.
If you have questions or concerns, please contact the Writing Assessment Office at 509-335-7959.