Holistic Assessment

Today in class I tried the holistic rubric rather than my usual analytical rubric. I thought the holistic approach would go faster for my grading. I had the students do a self assessment and then they brought their clay house and rubric to me and I hi-lited what my grading was. I had 3 sections of excellent, good and poor. I preferred that they don't circle one main group. I explained they they may get excellent in one section and good in another. This probably defeats the purpose of the holistic grading, but I felt their glazing job was not black nor white, but lots of gray in between. They were graded on 2 coats of glaze, Fully covered or no missed spots of glaze, glaze with the lines- not messy and no glaze on the bottom. They found the all, most and not many to be easy to understand. I asked them when we were finished how they liked doing the self assessment and a few liked it. Not a very exciting bunch. I liked that I felt like my grading went much quicker working with the kids. I also like that there was not points on it so the kids couldn't figure out what their grade would be. They could guess, but it wasn't right there for them to figure out. I would make a key for how many marks in each section correlated to a certain grade point or point system. I would also give them a copy from the beginning of glazing as a check off. I usually do that. The points that were on the rubric were already discussed previously with the class, so it was not a surprise of what they were being graded on.