Soooo... How Am I Supposed To Grade A Yearbook Class?

Burke typically saw significant improvement by the third deadline as the students started to understand what’s expected of them and editors gained experience in grading and

understanding content. “It’s a true learning lab.”

GRADING FOR PROGRESS When Burke would grade students, she was really looking for progress. “Anyone can be a good photographer. Anyone can be a good writer. They just have to practice. “ She took the time to sit and work with students, and even go sentence by sentence through a piece of writing to help them understand where the problems are. If a student was a weaker writer and she saw the story grow, Burke would grade accordingly. “At that last edit I’m not probably grading you as hard on the content and grammar as I would someone who’s a senior editor, I’ve had for four years, and I know they’re just being lazy.” Burke designed her system to account for the strengths of each individual student, but also remain objective. Each student knows what they need to have in their story, and the checklist ensures they get it. NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF Although yearbook is its own special thing, Burke emphasized that grading doesn’t need to be intimidating. It’s not that different from more traditional classes. “If you’re grading writing on good writing, it’s the same. The type of writing is different from an English class because we’re doing mostly feature-based stories for yearbook. There’s not a lot of news stories in a yearbook. But a rubric that you would use in English is pretty transferable to a rubric that you would use in journalism.” The big difference is that the final draft gets published, so students

Photo by Brooke Williams

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