Real life in the American college classroom: fearfully fearsome
We have witness what some would call the most fearsomeness creature of all time do horrible things to the environment, and in the last century we have also witnessed conservation at it’s best from that creature, man.
—Real, unedited copy from a real, unedited student
Contemplating this summer’s and next fall’s freshman comp courses, I’ve decided I’ve had it with spending more time grading student papers than the students spend writing them. And I’ve also had it with wasting my time trying to teach people things they should have learned in grade school. If they haven’t learned it by now, they’re not going to learn it.
Hence: the New Regime of Lady Cruella, Ph.D.
Yesterday I came up with a new set of grading rubrics designed to cut the vast number of hours required to grade the endless 2,500-word English 102 term papers required by the District. The underlying assumptions are
a) that I’m justified in expecting them to have paid attention in class, to have done the reading assignments, and to have learned such mind-bogglingly challenging concepts as paragraph organization and logical thematic structure;
b) that if you expect students to proofread their papers and to go to the writing center when they’re genuinely so illiterate they can’t write a competent sentence, they eventually will;
c) that they should fail for plagiarizing copy and for turning in papers written for other courses that don’t even fit the assignment;
d) that they should be expected to turn in a paper that fits the assignment in content, form, and length;
e) that I should not be expected to read papers than run more than about 200 words longer than the assigned 2,500 words; and
f) at the college level they should know basic grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary.
Is that asking too much?
Well, yes. Probably. But I no longer care.
Here’s how I’m gonna do this.
First, the plagiarism-blocking and bullshit-discouragement scheme:
The student wrote:
There are many reasons for such a high divorce rate, but one of the main theories is that people do not realize what they are getting themselves into when they marry. Couples do not realize that marriage is a job that must be worked at continuously in order for it to go well. Because many couples marry for the wrong reasons couple’s tend to grow apart. This process, all too often, ends in divorce.
The term paper mill’s author wrote:
According to recent statistics, there are more divorces now than ever before. At the rate things are going, the divorce rate may soon surpass the marriage rate. There are many reasons for such a high divorce rate, but one of the main ones is that people do not realize what they are getting themselves into when they marry. Couples do not realize that marriage is a job that must be worked at continuously in order for it to go well. Because many couples marry for the wrong reasons, a breakdown in communication results, which leads to a couple’s growing apart. This process, all too often, ends in divorce.
At the beginning of the semester I divide each class into three groups. These groups will be assigned specific broad topics, all three of which are loosely related. For example: the Great Depression in Arizona, Arizona’s Centennial, and Urbanization and the Environment in Arizona. I locate at least one substantial, solid piece of writing on each topic and make it available to the classmates, and also give them a few bibliographical resources to get them started.
Now, each group has to address the same topic throughout the semester. Group members write each of their three papers on the same topic, and they work together to track down research and to peer-review each others’ work. So, Group 1 classmates would write, say, an extended definition, a causal analysis, and an argumentive position paper on the Great Depression in Arizona. They would work together to learn about the history, choose appropriate topics, understand what “extended definition” means and how each person could write such a paper around some aspect of the Depression in this state, and to peer review each others’ drafts. Occasionally, they would give a presentation about their topic based on what they’ve learned so far. And finally, each person would turn in his or her extended definition paper. When they’re graded, the papers would be cleaned up and posted (sans grades, of course) on the course’s website, so classmates could read them
Then, when they go to do their next paper—say, a causal analysis on the same broad topic—they would of course have to dig up some fresh reference material, but each writer will also be allowed to use and cite one classmate’s extended definition as a source for this second paper. The final, long argumentation paper will also address the same topic, and here they could use no more than one classmate’s previous paper among their sources.
This will allow them to build toward their final paper, rather than giving them leeway to pick unrelated topics, which leaves them having to start from scratch on the 2,500-word magnum opus. Because the three topics would be loosely related, classmates in Group 1 might find useful ideas in Group 2 or Group 3 papers (and so on around the Maypole). It would cause a certain amount of cross-pollination, maybe introduce them to the concepts of collegiality and national discourse, and with any luck keep them rolling forward through the semester. And because the topics are so limited they’re unlikely to be covered in depth on Wikipedia, it would limit the opportunities for plagiarism. It will also block them from writing on the usual clichéd topics.
Then, the boot camp phase:
In the course of studying for and writing the first two papers—which at 750 words are relatively short—they’ll come to understand what is expected in terms of research, citation and documentation, organization, and basic grammar and structure. They will get feedback on all of these. So, the final paper will amount to a kind of final exam: here’s where they show what they can do.
By the time they get to the monster final paper, I will have explained that a rhetorical question is not a thesis statement, and discussed (again!) what a thesis statement is and how it works. Students will have been exposed to the basic style and grammar reviews, to concepts of logical thinking and fact-checking, and to ways to identify and use credible sources. Given the standardized tests the public schools are now making them take, I think we should be allowed to assume they already have basic writing skills and to dock them points when they display their illiteracy.
Then, for the final paper, I’m changing the rubrics so that I no longer will have to mark ditzy little errors but may inflict a substantial hit for significant flaws. Videlicet:
| Point Value | Starting value | Parameters for this assignment: |
| 100 | ||
| 0 | Content | |
| 100 | Essay contains no examples of provable plagiarism, intentional or not. | |
| 100 | Essay addresses an aspect of the project assigned to the author’s group, and the essay is a position paper, as described in the Seyler textbook and in class. | |
| 30 | Essay may incorporate research and commentary used in the term’s two shorter essays, but must effectively work this material into the author’s position argument. | |
| 30 | Author makes a clear claim and qualifies it as necessary (and in doing so makes it evident that he or she knows what is meant by claim and qualification). | |
| 30 | Author supports her or his position with logical argument and takes a courteous, conciliatory tone. | |
| 50 | Author uses facts and expert opinion gathered from credible sources to support the position. Essay contains adequate facts and expert opinion to support the author’s claim. | |
| 0 | Organization | |
| 40 | A thesis statement appears in the first or second paragraph. | |
| 10 | The thesis statement is not phrased as a rhetorical question. | |
| 30 | The essay is divided into coherent paragraphs (coherent means each paragraph hangs together logically). That is, each paragraph contains
1. a topic sentence (a topic sentence says what the paragraph is about); 2. at least two to five sentences explaining the point to be made in that paragraph; 3. specific details, such as facts or examples. The ideas within each paragraph are organized in logical, easy-to-follow order. |
|
| 20 | The paragraphs throughout the essay are organized in logical order. They are connected logically with good transitions. Author may use subheadings to help reader follow the argument. | |
| 100 | If no paragraphing appears, the essay is a failing paper. | |
| 0 | Logical thinking and fact-checking | |
| 30 | Author does not succumb to baloney found in questionable sources (see “Baloney Detection Kit” site and video). | |
| 30 | Essay is free of logical fallacies and factual errors. | |
| 0 | Form and format | |
| 10–30 | Essay is within 200 words of the assigned 2,500 words.
More 200 words ±: -10 |
|
| 15 | Essay is formatted according to MLA style (described at the Purdue website and in your handouts) | |
| 50 | Essay’s arguments are supported with facts and argument gathered in research. Sources for all of these are cited in MLA style. | |
| 50 | Each source is documented in a Works Cited section, following correct MLA style for Works Cited entries. | |
| 50 | The essay has at least a half-dozen credible sources. Of these, at least three must be hard-copy sources (i.e., from print documents found in a library or in the library’s databases). All sources must be peer-reviewed articles or books, unless there is a clear reason otherwise. No more than three can come from the World Wide Web. | |
| 20–100 | Each fact that is not widely known, each original argument or finding from a source, each direct quotation, and each paraphrase must be cited in-text, following MLA style. Honest errors: -20, The following errors will be regarded as plagiarism (-100 points; see above):
• using a source’s wording without putting it in quotation marks; • incorporating word-for-word passages in attempts at paraphrase without placing them in quotation marks; • paraphrased passages that are not cited in-text. |
|
| 0 | Composition and Language Skills | |
| 10–30 | Sentence structure is accurate, idiomatic, formal, and coherent. Sentences contain no comma splices or run-ons, and the paper is free of sentence fragments. Sentence error point values:
2–5 errors: –10 |
|
| 10–30 | Writing is free of grammar, style, and punctuation errors, especially those described in the Dress Your Writing for Success handouts. Point values:
2–5 errors: -10 |
|
| 10–30 | Writing is free of spelling errors. Point values:
2–5 errors: –10 |
|
| 10–30 | Word choice is accurate: the words mean what the author thinks they mean.
2–5 errors: –10 |
|
| total | = percent score on this paper | |
| x 3 | = point score on this paper |
In my rubrics, students start with 100 points and lose points for various specified errors. If a screw-up is not listed on the rubric, points are not deducted; I note the problem and explain it but can’t mark off points unless I’ve anticipated the whacko things they’re likely to do.
As you can see, some of these are big hits. But I figure this: if the student hasn’t learned to write in paragraphs, she’s not doing A or B work in a college-level course in composing college-level papers. If the student hasn’t learned to write a paper based on credible, well documented sources, he shouldn’t be passing a college-level course in writing source-based papers. And a ten-page paper that contains more than ten basic grammar, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary errors should not receive a grade higher than a C.
In this brave new world, here’s the technique for using the rubrics:
1. Look at the essay quickly to see if it fulfills the assignment. If not, mark it –100 and do not read anything more. State briefly why the paper fails to meet the assignment’s parameters.
2. If the writing is too smooth for a freshman, google a few lines. If there’s any sign of real plagiarism, –100. Identify the plagiarized passage(s) and do not do any further work on the thing.
3. Look for a thesis statement. If it’s missing, unidentifiable, or hopelessly weak, –30 points.
4. Look quickly at paragraph coherence. If even one paragraph is incoherent, –30 points. If the essay is one long piece of toilet paper with no paragraph breaks, give it a –100. But if the student has at least made a pass at paragraph breaks, do not subtract more than 30 points for incoherence: it’s –30 for any amount of incoherence.
***
At this point, look at the bottom line. If the paper starts out with a -60 because of organizational issues, stop grading. The paper has already failed and there’s no point in continuing.
***
5. Look for flaws in logical thinking and factuality. One truly stupid error is docked –30. If it’s just teenage naiveté (“women in the 1950s dressed elegantly to do housework: I learned that from watching I Love Lucy videos”) or mild stupidity and not a howler, warn the student but let it go. In this case, make it –30 for every truly howling bêtise and glaring error.
***
If a logical error on top of an organizational error knocks 60 points off the score, stop grading. Don’t waste time on a paper that has already failed.
***
{cackle!} You begin to see the potential for work abatement, eh?
6. Finally, look for errors of style, grammar, and spelling. Don’t correct them and don’t identify them in comments; just highlight them. Color-code the highlights: say, pink for sentence structure, pale yellow for grammar, punctuation, & style, pale green for spelling errors, pale blue for incorrect word choices. Then it will be easy to add them up. Subtract points as indicated in the rubrics. In the case of relatively minor errors, if the author repeats the same, identical mistake (say, a misspelling or misapprehension of a word’s meaning), highlight and count it only once. But count each fused sentence, fragment, subject-verb agreement issue, and pronoun-antecedent agreement flub as separate issues (i.e., if the author has three fused sentences, she has three errors, not one error for not learning what a comma splice is).
***
Keep an eye on the total of these deductions. The minute the total score drops below 60 points (the lowest D), stop grading. As soon as it’s clear a paper is going to fail, stop reading it.
***
It should be easy to spot items 1 through 5 quickly, in a brief read-through. Plagiarism, failure to address the assignment, and null paragraphing will flunk the paper, obviating the need to read it closely. Any two 30-point deductions (items 3, 4, and 5) will drop the total score to 40 points, and again I won’t have to read any further.
Papers whose total points are still above 60 can then be scrutinized more carefully. But now all the instructor will have to look for are mechanical, formatting, and style errors. Because at this late point in the term no comment needs to be made, this should go fairly quickly. Again, keep an eye on the total points; if the score drops below 60, just stop reading.
If I quit reading when I see a paper has already failed, it not only will cut out a great deal of unnecessary and frustrating work, it also will avoid adding insult to injury by inflicting a negative score. That is not a good thing to do, even when the student richly deserves it.
I’ve set up this rubric in an Excel spreadsheet with with formulae to add up the total and then multiply it by three to show the point score proportionate to the 300-point value of this last paper. The formulae will track the total score automatically as individual scores are entered in the cells. Thus if there’s a stage where I can stop reading, I’ll know it instantly.
If you’re faculty and would like a copy of the Lady Cruella Grading Rubric Spreadsheet, let me know in the comments and I’ll e-mail one to you.
😈
WOW! I’ve had something of a reprieve from comp. I did ban bumper sticker topics–gun control, abortion, etc. That cut down on the plagiarism.
“Bumper-sticker topics!” How they do love them! And they get really frustrated when you ban them, because then they can’t turn in the paper that got a B+ in their sophomore social studies class.
I don’t know how you can stand having students that pull crap like that (plagiarism, not sticking to theme, etc.). I’m assuming the only reason they are in college is because their parents forced them or they think they can sail through to meet the minimum requirements for some job they want. You’re not cruel, you’re giving them a more valuable lesson by doing this.
The first example looks like something I would write. Can you edit it please? As you can see, I’m shamelessly looking for a free English lesson. 🙂
I have a friend that is a professor at a community college. This friend says that now students that are caught cheating are called “responsible”. I’m amazed by this turn on that word. I used to think being “responsible” was a good thing. Political correctness rears its ugly head again.
@ Laddie: “Responsible”? Responsible for what? Shooting themselves in the foot?
@ Linda: I would guess that 80 to 90 percent of them are in school of their own volition. People who go to community colleges tend to be working stiffs who want to better themselves. Some are recent high-school graduates whose grades won’t get them into a four-year school, a number are very bright young people who realize how much they can save by taking their undergraduate gen-ed requirements in the much cheaper two-year schools, and quite a few are men and women coming back to school after a length of time in the workforce, who seek the smaller campuses and reassuring support a community college offers.
Why do they do this stuff?
Well, mostly because they know they can get away with it.
Outside of English departments, few faculty bother to check for plagiarism. If you’re not grading an English paper, which by definition requires a degree of literacy, what you do is look quickly at the thing to see if what they turned in addresses the assignment, check to see if they did any research, and then assess — perforce subjectively, because there aren’t many objective measures — how much effort and learning they put into their product. Thus in many classes they get an A for Effort, and if they can create the illusion that they did put in a fair amount of effort (they’re artists at this), they can do OK.
A secondary reason is that they’re terribly pressured. Most of them are working at least one and often two jobs while trying to go to school. The result is that they triage their classes — they do the best they can, and that’s not very good. They are simply too distracted and exhausted to perform at their best.
Students should not have to work while they go to college. Studying IS their job! The pressure for them to take jobs, exerted by parents, employers, HR people, and college administrators who raise tuition at rates that far outstrip inflation, is just flat morally wrong. It is seriously misguided, and it results in student practices like the ones I’ve described here. It also results in stress-related illness, drinking, and drug use. The whole idea that a person should hold down a job while taking college-level coursework is stupid beyond stupidity.
Dang. Now I’m riding a whole nother hobbyhorse!!!!!
Whoa, Paint… Back to the topic:
The third issue that leads to these shenanigans is that they’re scared. They know their education is wanting, especially if they’re graduates of Arizona’s K-12 system, which ranks either dead last or third from last nationally, depending on which study you’re looking at. They think they can’t do this — that they’re not going to succeed on their own skills. So, they resort to practices that are dishonest or wasteful, especially in required gen-ed courses that they don’t see any good reason for, such as freshman comp. They consider freshman comp a waste of their time, and so they feel no desire to work very hard at it. All they want to do is pass, preferably with an A (since a B is the equivalent of a C and a C says you’re dumb as a post).
And, frankly, the fourth major reason for all this is the colleges’ and unversities’ practice of hiring people like me. I am paid $2,400 to work for sixteen weeks. That’s $150 a week, per course. How much effort do you think that salary buys? It’s part-part-part-time pay, and it’s going to elicit part-part-part-time work, if for no other reason than that a person forced to try to get by on such pay must spend a substantial amount of time at some other work. Eighty percent of the District’s faculty are underpaid adjuncts — earning $150 a week with no benefits and not so much as a workroom with some chairs to rest your fanny between classes.
Try to imagine how much time it took to dream up that rubric and the accompanying scheme…I spent half the day on it yesterday. It’s a tiny, tiny part of what I will have to do to design three or four major assignments and all the ancillary in-class and out-of-class work, activities, and assessment required to organize and manage a credible college-level course. All of the time I put into course preparation is unpaid! Likewise, about 90 percent of the time I put into grading the hundreds of thousands of words my students turn in is paid in pennies, once you prorate the amount I earn over the time I spend on the courses. We’re not talking minimum wage here, folks: we’re talking a tiny fraction of minimum wage.
Most adjunct faculty are forced into adjunct work. They are either doing the job because they’re desperate (as I was after being laid off a real job earning a respectable wage) or because it’s a kind of hobby for them (as it is for me now). We are not paid enough to spend hour after hour tracking sources, proving plagiarism, and cracking down on students who may turn around and formally challenge a low grade based on plagiarism, forcing the instructor to spend still more unpaid hours defending himself. That brings us right back around to “why do they do this stuff? because they know they can get away with it.”
If we want our students to perform like real students, my friends, we need to provide them with real full-time education and real full-time educators.
And…you can stand having students pull crap like that because you know they’re just human beings. The little stinkers! 😉
@ Stephen: What, edit the first out-take? Sure. Here’s what the writer meant to say, and all he meant to say:
Humanity is really destructive.
LOL, you couldn’t possibly be more succinct.
By the way Funny, now I’m afraid to leave a comment for fear of appearing as an illiterate fool. English is not my native language, and my writing skill is woefully limited. I don’t know about others but English is such a difficult language to master.
Oh Funny… of all your posts this is the one I’ve enjoyed the most. It ticks all the boxes of my daily experience dealing with UG and PG students. I have tried everything to make the baloney stop, to make the students realise that the library has a purpose and that no, wikipedia is not an acceptable source (mind you that I once had an enraged student who accused me of being unfair and unrealistic with the choices of essay topic I gave them. She was having trouble finding it and her point was that if a topic was not on wikipedia, it was irrelevant and did not matter to the world).
I think some universities take plagiarism seriously to an extent. I say to an extent because for example, we use plagiarism detection software but then again, this does not pick up everything and so we also have to waste a ridiculous amount of time with google. Some people just don’t do it and if the software doesn’t pick anything up, they’re happy that it’s the student’s original work even if there’s terminology or a degree of complexity to suggest that there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark!
The ‘to an extent’ part really comes into action when things are sent for investigation (my institution has a committee for this). The investigation is usually about determining whether there was intent to deceive or whether it was unintentional (and possibly due to poor understanding of academic referencing conventions). I won’t lie; I have no sympathy at PG level because if a student does not understand referencing conventions having already attained an undergraduate degree, then they just won’t! And experience keeps suggesting this is the case as we struggle with the same PG students all throughout to the point where the argument of poor understanding becomes unsustainable… but then again, having given them previous chances that allowed them to continue, there is little to do close to the end when they are seen to have been ‘punished enough’ for having to re-do many assignments and get capped marks for it. So they end up finishing and question remains…
Anyway, I completeley agree that it is very difficult to deal with students at any stage if you are working with the assumption that they have been taught the basics and enter higher education to build up on that knowledge. I’ve had students with whom I’ve spent a whole afternoon going over their work to make them see why what they wrote lacks a proper argument hence is not of passing standard. I am a full-timer but even then, most of my (full-time) colleagues are not particularly willing to engage that far. The reality is that I too am getting tired of it because it seems like we’re doing the job of the teachers they had during their earlier formative years and in addition, we also have other demands –papers to publish, conferences to attend, funding to apply to, and admin to do!
Share your Lady Cruella Grading Rubric Spreadsheet if you may 🙂 I found there are some things in your post that I had not considered the way you do in your rubric. For instance, the issue of sources… I normally indicate how many in total they are expected to include but don’t go into specifics, say about how many www ones they can include. I think I need this is something that I will revise in mine because it may help to stop students quoting comments from forums!
@ Jen: Agreed, all the way around.
IMHO, it’s inappropriate for college-level faculty to be teaching basic skills that should have been learned in grade school.
Nor is it impossible for children to learn such elements as subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement (and what pronouns and antecedents are), and how to construct a complete, grammatically accurate sentence. I distinctly remember when and where I learned these things, and the teachers who taught them: in the third through sixth grades. I also distinctly remember relearning them in high school: our school promulgated a handbook called the “comma rules,” which we were required to memorize and show we could use in practice. I was certainly no prodigy, but I never found any of this stuff difficult.
The issue is that in the 1960s and 70s educators decided it was politically incorrect to teach standardized forms for English expression — what used to be called “correct” grammar, spelling, and style. Because some people would be offended by being told that the language spoken in their homes is “nonstandard” or “incorrect,” everyone would be taught no standard. The very idea that there is some ideal “correct” form would be expunged from the classroom.
The result is what we have: two or three generations of young people with no clue how to build a literate sentence. Because we now perforce draw educators from that pool of ill-trained students, it’s a rare teacher who understands how to construct grammatically and stylistically powerful writing.
The larger concepts of structure and organization — what Purdue calls the “higher-order” issues — are indeed very hard for some people to grasp. These concepts have to do with logical thinking, and if you can’t think logically, you have a very difficult time constructing a coherent paragraph or a smoothly organized paper. I can fully believe that an instructor would spend an entire afternoon trying to explain to some student why an illogical argument doesn’t work: when you can’t think things through clearly, you just. don’t. get. it.
Clarity of thought is also a skill, and it is one that is undergirded and enhanced by clarity of grammar and mechanics.
To put it another way: writing is thinking. Take away the basic grammatical skills needed to build clear writing, and you take away the “higher-order” skills needed to build clear thinking. You don’t build a skyscraper by starting at the top and working backward to the base; you start with the foundation and build upward. When students come to us with no foundation, we have nothing to build on.
I have an issue with plagiarism checkers: they don’t work.
M’hijito recently took a biology course as part of the catch-up work in the sciences he needs to do to fulfill his scheme to pursue a master’s of medical science. Eager to be sure his paper fulfilled the assignment, he ran it through the college’s plagiarism checker and learned the thing was rife with plagiarism.
This gent has an undergraduate degree from a very fine private liberal arts college, on top of 13 years at the best private schools in the state. Trust me: he knows from plagiarism. He said the paper absolutely was NOT plagiarized, and that the passages the program flagged either were original or were fully documented.
I can recognize when a passage doesn’t “sound” like something an amateur writer would produce — I don’t need a machine to flag suspicious passages. Unless the system can identify, retrieve, and show me the actual sources of the plagiarized material, running copy through such programs is yet another hassle and waste of my time. I never accuse a student of plagiarizing unless I can find and physically get my hands on the plagiarized source. Where undergrads are concerned, it’s usually pretty easy to do so. And if they get away with it? Well, they just get away with it. Really, they’re not cheating anyone but themselves. And their future employers.
Nor are they the ones doing the cheating. It’s the educational system that cheats them…and us.
I think some of these kids grew up to become content scrapers. 🙁
But seriously: I got my B.A. about a year and a half ago. When we did “peer review” of papers, I was shocked to see what some other students’ drafts looked like — and these were not freshman comp classes but 300 and 400 level courses. And I saw the same thing during my undergraduate thesis class (yep, my humanities-type undergrad degree required a thesis). We were put into small groups and had to read and comment on one another’s work. Wow, was some of that writing baaad. Run-on sentences, cloudy thinking, startling statements made but not backed up or even explained… My head would ache as I read this stuff.
I could never be a teacher, even if I had C. DeVille’s Evil Rubric on which to base my grading.
@ Donna–
Well, a couple of things are going on there.
One is that some people, especially those who are not very verbal on paper, write just AWFUL stuff in draft. Given time and a little feedback, they will produce perfectly fine copy in a second or third draft. Few people write like journalists, who are capable of producing acceptable copy on tight deadlines…most of us need lots of time to draft, revisit, and redraft papers.
The other is that most college students are KIDS. We have to keep reminding ourselves of this: a 19- or 20-year-old, no matter how bright, still has a lot of pyschological and mental growth ahead of him or her. The quality of their writing reflects that. There’s a point at which young people morph, weirdly enough, and rather abruptly their writing changes for the better. This seems to affect women at about the age of 25 and men sometime around 30.
I don’t believe adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s benefited from education that was much better than younger people get — the collapse of the U.S. educational system began in the early 1960s. A person in her 30s or 40s would have arrived in schools that already were staffed by teachers trained in educational methods but not in subject matter, that were well on the way to becoming devoted to social work, and that already were in bad shape academically.
Instead, I suspect people in the work world have to learn to think and communicate with some degree of clarity, and so over time they begin to write better. And they mature. At 30 or so, the person has a completely different attitude toward a college course than she had when she was 20.
Couldn’t resist a return. I think the problem is not political correctness, but the fact that the brainy women who used to teach K-12 no longer choose that career. English Ed students are often the WORST writers in a class and the most apt to plagiarize. Many of our M.A. students would flunk if I used your rubric.
@ frugalscholar: That is so completely right on! Back in the dark ages, when a woman who wanted to work instead of raise a family had three career choices (teacher, nurse, or secretary), those trades were characterized by very bright and competent people. Now that women have more choices, most of which (except for nursing) are better paid, that’s where the bright ones go.
This has been coming on us for a long time, though. I can recall my freshman-year college roommate — way back in 19 and aught 62 — announcing that she planned to major in education because “it’s the easiest major you can take and it guarantees you a job.” In my sophomore year I met a graduating senior education major who said he had NEVER purchased (or read) a book in any of his major courses.
Alas, I have to agree that some of the worst writers in my courses also are English Ed majors. On the other hand, though, I’ve also had some excellent writers and communicators from that major.
I’ve used a similar rubric on the magazine writing students, and yea verily, a LOT of them have flunked. Mine being a community college, a number of them dropped. However, those who hung in there rose to the challenge. I mellowed my standard a little (as noted above, I now refrain from assigning scores in the negative numbers…) and they sharpened up a little. We met in the middle, and the result was that those who didn’t run away screaming did OK in the course.
With the exception of a few students (surprisingly few) who have cognitive disabilities, most students CAN do what these rubrics ask them to do if you EXPECT them to do it. We’ve seen that Stephen, above, worries about his ESL issues. But if you take a look at the rubrics, you’ll see that the heaviest weight is laid on critical thinking, organization, and research skills. None of these is exclusive to the English language. In my experience, logical thinking and sane organization shine through no matter what language the writer speaks; since issues of grammar, spelling, and mechanics are less heavily weighted, even a student for whom English is a challenge can do OK with these rubrics.
One might say especially for students for whom English is a challenge, since they often come from nations whose school systems far outshine ours.
>>2. If the writing is too smooth for a freshman, google a few lines.<<
This one worries me. I am the daughter of two educators (Mom was MA in music and Dad ABD in English and Library Science). Needless to say, I do NOT write like your average Freshman. I'd hate to think that just because my writing is 'smooth' (since I try so hard to polish it), that I might be suspected of plagiarism. After all, it is very difficult to be 100% sure that any turn of phrase you write has never been done before; that it's not out on the web somewhere and you never even saw it.
On the other hand, I refuse to 'dumb down' my college assignments due to peer pressure. I had enough of THAT in High School, thanks.
@ KnitterGRL: And please please don’t “dumb down” your papers!!!! We who have to read all that stuff kiss the ground upon which you write intelligently!
It’s pretty easy to spot copy that has been professionally edited. Not even working journalists routinely turn out edited copy — I know, because I used to make my living editing their copy. And the reason you assign what’s called a “diagnostic writing” (please write about three paragraphs, while you’re sitting here in class, introducing yourself and telling me something about why you’re here and what you hope to accomplish) is to get a look at how each classmate writes. If a submitted paper is radically different in skill and style, your eyebrow may rise.
If I’m surfing the Web trying to find a plagiarized passage, first I look for sophisticated sentences of some complexity — these are not likely to be repeated by accident. If I find something, I always try to track down two or three other passages. One lifted sentence in isolation is probably the result of carelessness or naivete; two or more suggest deliberate plagiarism.
Thanks for writing back (fangirl squeal here LOL)! I always wondered about those little ‘journaling’ assignments. They make sense now. The instructor gets a ‘taste’ of the student’s style, and she/he gets to see which students might need extra help or are slotted into the incorrect class (might need remedial help, for example).
The hardest thing for me in your class, I think, would be to stick to the assigned length. I always want to get deeper into the subject. My Intro to Cultural Antrhopology prof wrote a note on the essay part of my final “Save this exam. Use for your thesis”. I about expired on the spot from a mix of pride and embarassment!
@ KnitterGRL: LOL! I do hate length requirements. The lengths are a District requirement…IMHO demanding that students write xx number of words is one of the most pernicious things you can do to a young writer. At GDU, I always used to tell students to “write until you’re done and then stop.”
Poor little things. They’re so used to being assigned specific lengths, they don’t know what to do with that.