ABSTRACT
I am not sure what the global reading is actually evaluating. I suspect it is more style than rhetoric or content. A global reading is an attempt to give a grade without articulating the criteria that underlie the grade. The only positive reason to practice global reading at all is to be able to get to those criteria quickly. When I am teaching a course for the first time, I am trying out essay prompts and have not fully articulated my rubric beyond the specificity of content that each prompt creates. I use global reading as a way of helping me set up my rubrics for scoring the essays. I globally read five or six essays drawn haphazardly from the pile. I then try to discover the criteria that emerged as I think about the differences between them. When I read the next five or six essays, this time drawn from the pile in order, I self-consciously apply the criteria. When the criteria do not describe the strengths and weaknesses sufficiently, I add more or modify the descriptions of the ones I have. While global reading may appear to save time, it is actually slower than criterion-based scoring. It also introduces inconsistencies into the grading process, makes the grade less defensible to the student, and gives you less control over the evaluation process than you should have.
