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Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we've found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities-no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.
At the end of every semester or term, most teachers must send the registrar a grade-a one-dimensional quantitative score-to represent the quality of each student's performance in a course. Like most teachers, we find the process time-consuming, difficult, and troubling. In this essay we suggest grading contracts as a way to produce these grades that improves learning and teaching and reduces some unfairness. Furthermore, contracts help us make our own teaching truer to our values, easier, and more satisfying.1
Until now, contract grading has had a kind of subterranean presence in our field: used frequently, but discussed rarely. A Google search reveals a surprisingly large number of teachers who use some form of learning contract in various disciplines for diverse goals. But in reviewing the published literature for this essay, we discovered only a few articles devoted to the topic (e.g., Mandel; Zak and Weaver). In Stephen Tchudi's 1997 collection of nineteen essays, Alternatives to Grading Student Writing, none of the essays focuses on contracts.2
Recently, however, contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. Ira Shor, in his book When Students Have Power, describes learning contracts as a way of sharing power, redistributing authority, and negotiating through dialogue (20). A version of Shor's contract is equally central in a recent College Composition and Communication essay by William Thelin and also in a 2005 essay by Isabel Moreno-Lopez published in Radical...