Student Self-Scoring: A Free Lesson

Last week was incredibly busy. I was in tech week for our school’s one act, training a student teacher, plus the usual of being a teacher and mom. My AP Lit students wrote timed writings on the third day of the semester, but I still hadn’t looked at them.  I’m usually pretty quick to give feedback, aiming for at least a week, so I was annoyed with myself. However, no matter what I did, I couldn’t carve out the time to grade them all.

Then, I got an idea. I would try self-scoring again.

I created a simple slideshow with instructions, got out a bunch of highlighters, and printed my students’ essays off (they were taken on AP Classroom). In one lesson, I coached them through self- and peer-review and received some of the clearest written feedback all year—from my students about themselves.

Here’s the lesson you can try with your own students.

What you’ll need

• Printed essays
• Highlighters
• Essay prompt
• Rubric

Set Up

Before your students come into the lesson, pre-sort students into groups of 3-4. I recommend heterogenous groups based on writing ability, so high, middle, and low-performing writing students can mix together.

It’s also important to tell students that self-scoring is not a replacement for teacher feedback. I still read each of these essays after the lesson and gave some feedback. I didn’t want my students to think I was too tired to grade them and was doing this instead of scoring them, so I led with this information.

The Lesson

Step 1 – Highlight

Each student had 4 highlighter or marker colors and created a color key at the top of their essay. First, they read over their body paragraphs, highlighting for APE (Assert, Prove, Explain). This is the analytical writing method instructed at my school and it helps students move from summary to analysis.

Once the body paragraphs were highlighted, students identified their line of reasoning, both in the introduction and in each body paragraph. In most paragraphs, this functions in the Explain part of an APE paragraph, but many students found that they forgot to mention it or it showed up awkwardly in places.

When students finished highlighting, I asked them to discuss their takeaways in their groups. I walked around and listened and was impressed with how honest and critical they were willing to be with their own essays.

Step 2 – Literary Terms

We just finished a prose unit, so my students are starting to show off a lot of vocabulary learning in their essays. While this can be good, it can sometimes interfere with establishing a line of reasoning or making a real claim. I asked students to circle all literary terms in their essays, whether they were explicitly stated or more implied.

After they did this, they discussed how many they used and whether they thought they incorporated literary terms well. On the AP Lit prose rubric, students are required to include at least two literary terms to score high. However, I encourage them to treat literary terms like sprinkles on a doughnut, rather than the doughnut itself. If your whole paragraph is about the presence of imagery, you usually abandon analysis and the line of reasoning.

Step 3 – Peer Review

Once essays were self-reflected, students felt confident enough to share their essays with each other. I didn’t ask them to score them or annotate the essays, simply to read them. This is why heterogenous groups are good for this activity. It allows lower-performing readers to read essays by stronger writers in a low-risk way. They have already identified their own weaknesses together, but hopefully they can see how an argument could be made more concisely or a line of reasoning argued throughout an essay.

It takes a classroom culture of trust and respect to pull this off, one that is sometimes beyond my seniors. There was one group that became too critical and judgy of another student’s essay. I stepped in and read it myself, telling all members of the group, including the author himself, that they were being way too harsh. I also reminded them that I could publicly point out errors in any essay in the room to humiliate and shame, but I choose not to do this because it is neither constructive nor kind. This curbed the behavior and the rest of the groups were very constructive and kind to one another.

Step 4 – Scoring with the Rubric

My last step asked students to revisit the rubric, which they’ve seen many times, and give themselves a score. I also asked them to write a few sentence explaining why they felt they earned this score. Once they were finished self-scoring, the highlighted essays and rubrics were stapled and turned in.

Step 5 – Teacher Assessment

A few days later, I finally had enough prep time to sit down and look over the essays. Having them annotated and highlighted enlightened my reading and a lot of the feedback I would have given was already done for me.

I also loved seeing their rationalizations on the rubric. Many of the self-scoring grades were spot on and a few I adjusted by up to a point, some upwards and a few downwards. For example, one student gave himself the sophistication point because he used some good vocabulary. I explained that his vocabulary was growing and on its way to the sophistication point, but not extensive enough to encompass the whole essay and earn the point.

Post-Lesson Reflection

Looking back, I’m so happy I tried this. I did it once years ago, but it wasn’t structured enough and some students felt I was just trying to get out of grading myself. I also want to try it with my Honors sophomores as they work on their research papers.

Here’s the PowerPoint file if you want to download it. Just be sure to modify it to reflect whatever assignment or prompt you’re using. I also deleted my student group slide, so add that in near the beginning.

More Resources

Check out these other blog posts or writing resources to help your students become better writers!