During the discussions about the new curriculum, the Writing Portfolio came up as a point of conflict. For the portfolio, sophomores are asked to collect some of their essays and reflect on their writing. The portfolios are read by anonymous professors and rated, “Needs Work,” “Pass,” or “Exemplary.” Students have been complaining about the portfolio for years, but the faculty thinks it is an important tool for standardizing the discussion of writing, a water mark for the school’s academic objectives.

Matt Pieh did a great piece in the Carl about the his experience with the writing portfolio. He published his five-sentence-long evaluation, which is little more than a few deriding comments. The professor who read his portfolio wrote:

I think your confidence in your writing ability, though admirable, may be misplaced… At times your prose can be stilted, overwritten – and at other times quite pedestrian.

The evaluation isn’t helpful or constructive in any way, and that’s where the conversation ends. Pieh will never know who Grader #30 is, and no one else will read his Writing Portfolio.

Upon arriving at Carleton as a freshmen, I got a pamphlet titled An Insider’s Guide to the Sophomore Writing Portfolio which read, “More goes into the scoring than you might think. The readers are careful and conscientious and give every portfolio a good deal of attention.” That hardly seems like the case here. Pieh concludes by saying, “In my opinion, the Writing Portfolio is just another hoop for Carls to jump through, and I don’t think it’s worth the cost.”

It’s easy to imagine ways to improve the writing portfolio. What if the evaluation was a half-hour long interview with the grader in which the strengths and weaknesses of the student’s writing could be discussed? And why are the graders anonymous and not the students? If anything, the students should be anonymous and the graders shouldn’t be. But the Education and Curriculum Committee has given up on improving the portfolio without even discussing any changes to it.

Because I’m going abroad this spring, I got a head start on my writing portfolio over break. I’m including this blog as one of my essays, but I’m not expecting anything great. As the my pamphlet says, “You may not see the merits of the portfolio as a tool for assessment, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have to complete one.” Is this really what the designers of the Writing Portfolio had in mind?