international students - Grading term papers and reports written by non-native speakers

I'm teaching an advanced undergraduate computer science course that requires a 5-7 page term paper worth about 20% of the student's grade.

The class has several international students, and some of them do not have a strong command of the English language. Clearly, these students are at a disadvantage when it comes to this assignment.

To complicate matters, the course is part of the university's "integrated writing" curriculum, so, according to university policy, the quality of the writing must be evaluated as part of the grading process.

I'm trying to devise a fair scheme where non-native English speakers are not graded as stringently as native English speakers, yet not have the grading be so lenient for non-natives that it becomes unfair in the other direction.

I've already decided that some criteria can be graded on equal footing (such as overall paper organization, and the quality of the overall research), while others (such as word selection and sentence structure) can be looked at on more of a two-tier scale.

I'm wondering if anyone here as dealt with this dilemma before and, if so, how they might have approached this problem.

Answer

As a non-native English speaker who teaches mathematics in an English-speaking university in Canada, I have little sympathy for the English struggles of international students. In my experience, most of the students who have big struggles with the language are those who bought the TOEFL result instead of learning. The students who are really committed come a year earlier to take English full-time, and they don't have major issues when they start their specific studies.

Now, to address your specific question, in 13 years teaching here I never had reason (nor interest) to take marks off because of grammar. I will reduce the grade when I read nonsense, but that happens with Canadian-born students too.