Campus Reform: Writing prof: Grading based on quality is racist
American University in Washington, D.C. is hosting an event on Feb. 1 on "antiracist" grading with a professor who serves as director of a writing center which argues that American grammar is a "racist," "unjust language structure."
The seminar, titled, "Grading Ain't Just Grading: Rethinking Writing Assessment Ecologies Towards Antiracist Ends," will be led by University of Washington-Tacoma professor Asao Inoue, who previously published an essay titled, "A Grade-less Writing Course that Focuses on Labor and Assessing," in which he argues in favor of "dispens[ing] almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades."
"I argue that a productive way to design and teach a first-year writing course is to conceive of it as labor – and calculate course grades by labor completed – and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades," Inoue writes in an essay summary on Academia.edu.
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“We promise to emphasize the importance of rhetorical situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts,” the poster continues. “We promise to challenge conventional word choices and writing explanations.”