ASSESSING STUDENTS’ ESSAY

ASSESSING STUDENTS’ ESSAY

Assessing a student’s essay can be hard. Teachers have long been marking their students’ writing based on the marking scheme. Marks are given based on the criteria they have in their writing. The other day, our lecturer had divided us into groups and assigned us to give mark to that particular student’s essay which was entitled "A Scary Experience". We were given a guideline which was based on a marking scheme provided by our lecturer. We gave that student a score of 11 marks out of 20.

I personally think that student’s work was worth giving him/her a pass. He/she has a modest command of the language. Although his/her sentences were not proper and there were some wrong usage of words, but I still can understand what that student was trying to convey in his/her essay. There was no communication breakdown as the whole story written by that student was pretty clear. The idea of the story was there and that student himself/herself was clear about the topic he/she had chosen to write about. The story developed throughout the writing and the plot of the story can be seen clearly as there were introduction, rising action, climax and the ending of the story which, in my opinion was ended quite abruptly. Despite the fact that there were some mechanical errors, that student’s work showed modest understanding of the English Language.

In conclusion, I think that students’ writings should not be assessed based on their grammars and sentence constructions only. It is important to look at their contents and ideas. Some students do have really great ideas but they do not know how to express their ideas or thoughts into sentences or in another word, they have limited vocabularies and knowledge in grammars. Teachers, should give more emphasize on their good points in writing rather than focusing on their grammatical errors.