English departments often want common assessments and struggle to build them. Teachers have different approaches, different texts, and different ideas about what a strong essay looks like. Franklin's Autobiography offers a practical starting point. It is widely taught, accessible in excerpts, and rich enough to support several kinds of writing.

A common assessment is only useful if teachers score it the same way. Otherwise the data reflects grader differences instead of student learning. That is why the work of building the rubric and calibrating scores matters more than the prompt itself.

Departments also worry about workload. A shared essay across every section means hundreds of papers, and no one wants a heavy new grading burden. The design has to be efficient.

The steps below describe how to set up a Franklin-based assessment that is fair, manageable, and useful.

Why Franklin works for a shared assessment

Franklin's text is available in public domain editions and many excerpted forms, so every teacher can use the same passage. It supports rhetorical analysis, argument, and genre study, which means the department can choose the skill it wants to measure. The passages also fall in a range that most eleventh graders can handle with support.

• Agree on one skill to measure, such as analysis of an author's purpose and method.
• Choose a single passage and a single prompt for all sections.
• Write a shared rubric with four or five criteria and clear level descriptors.
• Set the timing and conditions so every class writes under similar circumstances.
• Decide in advance how scores will be recorded and reported.

Choose anchor papers

Anchor papers are sample essays that illustrate each score level. Collect them from a pilot run or from a previous year, and remove student names. Three to five per level is plenty. They give teachers a concrete reference and make discussions about scoring much easier.

Annotate each anchor with a short explanation of why it earned its score. Pay special attention to the borderline cases, since those are where teachers disagree. Put the annotations in a shared document that the department can update.

Run a calibration session

Before scoring, have everyone read and score the same three essays independently. Then compare. Where scores differ by more than a point, talk it through and decide what the rubric should say. This meeting is the most valuable part of the process, and it can be done in under an hour.

Repeat a short version each year. Teachers change, standards drift, and even experienced graders benefit from recalibrating. Some departments also use an AI tool that applies the shared rubric as a consistency check, comparing its scores against teacher scores on a sample to spot where the rubric language is unclear.

Use results without ranking teachers

Common assessment data is easy to misuse. If teachers believe scores will be used to compare them, they may inflate grades or resist the process. Frame the data as a way to see which skills students struggle with across the department, and not who teaches best.

Look at results by criterion. If evidence use is weak across all sections, that is a departmental teaching priority. Share strategies from teachers whose students did well on that row, and plan a follow-up assessment to see whether it helped.