C3 grasses, which include Leymus chinensis and stipa grandis are dominant species in the typical steppe. Field site was on the permanent field sites of the Inner Mongolia Grassland Ecosystem Research Station, China, which has been fenced-off since 1979. Also, we select a rangeland which named Xilinhua Pasture located on the southwestern of Dowuzhumuqin County. Based on community characteristics under different grazing pressure, we explored a model for assessing the steppe ecosystem health. This model has combined the function, or vigor (V), structure, or organization (O) and resilience to perturbation (R) of steppe ecosystem and its environmental conditions (C). The objective of this study was to provide a synthetic, simple, accurate and suitable method for grassland ecosystem health assessment and management. Firstly, we used Leymus chinensis steppe in 1981 as a reference ecosystem which can be representative of undisturbed, climax steppe communities, and then established the calculation formulae for simulating the vigor, organization and resilience of steppe communities. In this model, we used the direct effective precipitation as index reflecting the environmental conditions. Finally, the feasibility of CVOR model was tested by analyzing the influence of grazing pressure and fencing protection on the health of typical steppe ecosystem.