Grading a Sample Paper (Sophie Horowitz)

This is a guest post for our Unusual Teaching Ideas series, by Sophie Horowitz (UMass, Amherst) 

I teach at UMass, Amherst, and one of my regular classes is a large section of Medical Ethics (100-200 students, 3 TAs). After a couple of semesters of teaching the class, I realized that the students felt both intimidated and unprepared for the amount of writing we were doing in the class (currently, two 500-word papers and two 1000-word papers). I was also dismayed by how many students claimed (on student evaluations, for example) that they did not understand how papers were graded, or asking for a rubric, despite my providing them the rubric from day one.

I realized that it would be worthwhile to do more explicit instruction on writing in class. Beyond simply telling them that it’s okay to use the first person, or showing them a sample paper that does everything right, I created two sample papers and ask the students to grade them using my rubric.

The Assignment

 The activity is to grade, and then discuss, two sample papers. These papers respond to Mary Midgley’s “On Trying Out One’s New Sword”, which we read and discuss in class beforehand. One is a “good” paper which, if I do say so myself, deserves an A according to my rubric. The other paper includes several common undergraduate mistakes. (You can see all of these materials on my website.)

1. Before class, students read both papers and grade them according to the rubric.
2. In class, I give them a “scavenger hunt” where they pair up and look for both good and bad features of each paper: each paper’s thesis statement, properly and improperly cited quotations, irrelevant details in the “bad” paper, a place where the “bad” paper’s author contradicts himself, and so on.
3. During the class discussion, the TAs and I circulate around the room to answer questions and talk to students. I also have them answer some questions on Moodle about the assignment: what did they learn? What did they find surprising? Do they want to change the grades they assigned the night before?
4. The next day in lecture I pick out some comments from their Moodle responses to discuss together. We have a broader discussion about academic writing, why it is okay to use the first person, why using signposting is not bad writing in this context, and whatever else comes up.

Results

This exercise has been interesting, helpful, and surprising, both for me and for the students. Here is some of what I’ve found:

* Many students report that they better understand what we are looking for in their writing after doing the exercise

For example, this year one student wrote, “This activity really helped me to understand how the rubric will be applying to our papers and what it takes to get an A. A paper can be simple and direct and still get an A.” Another wrote, “I've learned to make sure I understand the points of the articles before writing about them… More than half of the grading is revolved around accuracy, so I want to make sure I completely understand the papers before writing about them.”

* It also gives us some context to talk about signposting and the first person. (Side note: I think we should stop saying, if we are saying it, that these conventions are peculiar to philosophy, when they’re in fact common to lots of academic fields. On the day after we do the sample paper exercise, I show them examples of scientific papers from PubMed to illustrate this.)

* I have been surprised by how many students initially think that the “bad” paper is better than the “good” one.

Fortunately, after doing the scavenger hunt, many of them come around. One student wrote, “I realized that [the bad] paper, although had a lot of content, was actually very confusing. When trying to pick out the pieces of [the bad] paper while doing the scavenger hunt I realized it was a lot more confusing and each part was not as clear.”

Many students also did not catch the flat-out contradiction in the bad paper’s conclusion until they did the scavenger hunt, which prompted them to look for it.

* A couple of students this year learned a surprising lesson about themselves. One wrote, “I noticed that [the bad] paper was confusing, however my gut reaction was that I didn't understand what he was saying – not that his paper was badly written.”

* Even after doing the assignment, some students are still not on board with the kind of philosophical writing we are expecting from them. Many comment that the writing in the good paper is “choppy” or “doesn’t flow”, which I attribute to the (okay, probably over the top) signposting. One student this year remarked that “Sally”, the fictional author of my good paper, “writes like a fifth-grader.” I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

Questions for further improvement

Some aspects of this activity still need work: most importantly, timing it in the semester. If it comes too early, there are two problems: first, students will not have had a chance to try any writing themselves before discussing it, which I think makes it more difficult to internalize. And second, it is confusing to them to discuss expectations for longer papers at the beginning of the semester, when I don’t require that they write anything in this format until later on. But if it comes too late in the semester, students will have turned in their earlier assignments without having the benefit of talking through the rubric in detail.

I welcome any suggestions for how to incorporate this kind of instruction. And if you try this assignment, I’d love to know how it turns out for you.

Comments

[Chris Stephens]

This looks great! I have tried to incorporate grading a sample paper into my courses, but have used only one paper: I sometimes get the students to mark and annotate it according to some rubric. But I think increasing the sample size is a good idea (a good and a bad paper).

I have also had them redo parts of papers - where I write (badly) say, just a single first paragraph of a paper, and then get them to rewrite it to make it better.

I've also used modified "scavenger hunts" to get them to find things on each others' first drafts. (I ask them to "find the thesis and underline it" and ask them questions like "does it say both what and how the author will argue" etc.)

Sometimes I use multiple choice questions (e.g. "which of the following is the best opening to a paper?" and have them answer them in small groups. It is sometimes surprising what they think is the best opening, but then I use it as an opportunity to discuss expectations, etc.)