The Silly (Portfolio) Season

Yes, they're what's on everyone's mind, it seems. Certainly on mine. Between the huge pile on my living room floor and the arguments they caused yesterday at my department meeting, I can't get away from them. But yet, I still love them.

I hold to the belief that they are the best way to evaluate student writing even if, in my department's desire for something they can call "outcomes assessment" (and yes, I said "they" and not "we," since in this area, I feel very much apart), portfolios have become a different animal from what I always thought they should be. My department's portfolio does not require students to submit rough drafts and includes a mandatory in-class essay in response to a text which is written over two class periods. Every portfolio is read by another instructor, who assigns it an adisory grade of pass or not pass for basic composition and high pass, pass, low pass or not pass for composition. The instructor of record then decides upon the student's final grade.

Thus, portfolios are primarily a method for evaluation, not development and growth, which is how I always understood them. There is a page length requirement, an MLA documentation requirement, and the in-class essay requirement. The student does get to choose most of the pages which make up the bulk of the portfolio, but within those pages, he/she is supposed to be sure to demonstrate certain things: knowledge and control of thesis, essay structure, development and support, grammatical proficiency, integration of texts, etc.

When we sit down to read and evaluate each other's portfolios, certain problems always arise. Because we cannot agree amongst ourselves about such things, we argue about whether a strong voice trumps grammatical errors, whether a weak in-class essay is balanced out by strong revised essays, whether missing MLA documentation really matters in an otherwise brilliant and obviously unplagiarized portfolio. These could be fruitful discussions, but they haven't been. Instead, people have often just dug in their heels. The upside is that in the end the outside reader's evaluation is only advisory, but some department members have even questioned whether that should be changed and the other reader's assessment should be binding (at which point I fantasize about being Lucy Lui in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and jumping on the table with a very sharp sword).

It's an imperfect process, and one which for me, frankly, violates many of my beliefs about portfolios in particular and the effective teaching of writing in general. I understand how portfolios became the humane answer to institutionally or state-required assessment (See Elbow and Belanoff in Kathleen Blake Yancey's Situating Portfolios, for example), but there is a very real danger in destroying everything wonderful about them in the process. I wonder, in fact, if our attempts to kill the assessment bird and the teaching bird with this one stone have been wise, and if portfolios would be better used as the teaching tool they were created to be and assessment were left to other methods.