This one brought a smile to my old ugly face; a university seminar is teaching how not to judge the quality of writing when grading papers:
“American University is hosting a seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.”
It’s led by Asao Inoue, a University of Washington-Tacoma professor, and the purpose is to pursue “antiracist ends” through writing assessments.
A national scholarly organization that preaches its “commitment” to academic excellence came out swinging against the seminar, telling The College Fix that Inoue’s ideas are “destroying the very idea that composition classes should teach all students to write well.”
In an email, National Association of Scholars spokesperson Chance Layton said Inoue is “substituting social justice ideologues’ bigotry for instruction in composition”:
The national dominance of social justice educators such as Prof. Inoue indoctrinates college graduates nationwide into social justice ideology and bigotry–but fails to teach them how to write a coherent sentence.
Inoue’s publications on writing assessments suggest that he sees subconscious racism in standards, due to white students consistently outperforming black and Latino students.
“We must rethink how we assess writing, if we want to address the racism,” Inoue wrote in his 2015 book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.”
In another paper, “A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing,” Inoue argues that writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”
I hope that everyone in class got that one right and anticipated that there would be some “racism” connection feeding the madness. What is the bet that if it was White students falling behind, there would be no concern at all?