How the Other Half Grades

My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.

Students in all majors are also required to take five "Writing Across the Curriculum" classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of these classes are offered by the English and History departments, while science and engineering departments offer very few WAC courses. This leads to a fair amount of grumbling among science majors, who point out that students in the humanities can meet the requirement easily, without having to take courses outside their field of interest, while science majors need to go over to English or History to pick up their writing courses.

I have a small amount of sympathy for this argument (though I personally didn't have any trouble with taking English and History courses, back in the day), and I wanted to make sure I would have enough students register for the class to be sure of being able to offer it (officially, we need six students to sign up for a course in order to get teaching credit for it), so I agreed to make Quantum Optics a WAC class. As I used to be on the committee that certified such classes, I knew what the requirements were, and set the syllabus to include at least one short "article summary" paper, and a longer final research paper on a topic related to the subject of the class.

However, it also turns out that either the subject is really interesting, or students like me (probably because I'm a sap, and will agree to teach a WAC class for science majors), because I ended up with 17 students in the class, easily double what I expected. Which leaves me in an unusual spot for a physics professor: I have actual papers to grade, instead of just exams.

I realize that 17 papers to grade is a light term for humanities faculty, but it's way more than I wanted to deal with. Look at it this way: I've got 17 students, who had to write 10-15 pages each, which works out to 170-255 pages. That's basically a novel's worth of student writing about research topics in Quantum Optics.

On top of that, it's a novel I've already read, because I had them do mandatory rough drafts, and met with them individually to go over the drafts. With a few exceptions, there aren't going to be huge structural changes in any of these papers before the final draft, and the few that did require large-scale reorganization won't have gotten as much as they need, so I'm basically going to be reading the same thing I read last week, with some of the spelling errors fixed. And I have to find some way to assign grades to these that will work for both a paper on ion trap quantum computing and a paper on the Aharanov-Bohm effect (I put it on the list of possible topics because there's a short bit on it in the textbook-- I didn't think anybody would pick it...).

I probably ended up putting too much effort into sentence-level stuff in the drafts, but then that's the only way to learn to write. My own professional writing skills were developed only through the process we called "paper torture" at NIST, where someone would write a draft of a paper, and then the co-authors on that paper would get together and rip the draft to shreds, questioning every point of grammar, and every little word choice. To get a paper through that process, you had to learn to write effectively, and fight for every phrase. Some of the students looked a little bemused at some of the things I was challenging in the draft meetings, but compared to what I would do for a journal article, this was a walk in the park.

Anyway, I'm going to try to take a more... holistic view for the final drafts, and read them through on a higher level, without sweating the grammar mistakes quite so much. This will probably fail miserably, but I'm also going to have final exams to grade from my intro E & M class, and I want to get all my grading done before next week, so I can go into Research Mode for the summer, which means I need to work fast.

If nothing else, this is giving me a new appreciation for what my colleagues in the humanities do every term.

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Reminds me of what my old English teacher from my boys' school days said when he retired. It was part of a faculty remembrance in an alumni magazine. In the teachers' lounge he told this other teacher what a relief it would be not to have to read all the crap his students wrote. It completely blew my image of him as a kind of Mr Chips.

By Mark Paris (not verified) on 07 Jun 2006 #permalink

This leads to a fair amount of grumbling among science majors, who point out that students in the humanities can meet the requirement easily, without having to take courses outside their field of interest, while science majors need to go over to English or History to pick up their writing courses.

Yes, to pick up writing credits AND actually meet girls -- I don't know about the science department, but that's the way it was in the Engineering department.

By No One of Cons… (not verified) on 07 Jun 2006 #permalink

Yes, to pick up writing credits AND actually meet girls -- I don't know about the science department, but that's the way it was in the Engineering department.

Times have changed-- fully half of our senior majors this year were women (four of eight).

(OK, that's an anomaly-- there's one woman, total, in the next three classes. But we're very proud of this class...)

At least you're not grading lab reports, where each student is writing about the same experiment. Those get boring real fast.

My undergrad curriculum had its own version of "paper torture" -- a mandatory senior-year course that hid under the title of the first semester of a general project sequence, but was really about scientific writing. The first week's assignment was a multipage paper on a topic that we knew reasonably well. Those came back graded shortly thereafter, and I think the highest grade in the class was a C-minus -- and there was enough red ink on the papers to justify the grades, too.

Once the professor had thereby gotten our attention, he spent the next several weeks of the class explaining how to do better, and assigning rewrites and new papers for practice. I worked harder in that class than I had in just about any other -- I had nearly a 4.0 average at the time, and here I was doing the best job I could on a paper, and getting a B on it. The quality of the grading was pretty key to making that work, though -- it was clear that the papers were read, and the red-pen comments were on-point and consistent with the grades, although completely merciless.

And, by the time the semester was over, we were a classroom of engineering students who could write -- I think the classroom average on the papers was a hard-won B, and we knew that that meant something. (And I think in the end analysis it meant a final grade of an A-minus at least; while the professor was harsh with grades in the class, he wasn't going to destroy our GPAs because of it.)

I still proofread papers like he did, too.

Probably a silly question, but why did you decide to have the paper that you work through with your students and cover with red ink be the same paper that you grade at the end of the year? Wouldn't it have been less boring for you, and a better test for them, to have two different (possibly shorter) papers?

yeah, drop that "rough draft" BS. It only encourages students to come up with half-assed reports, they can always say "it's a rough draft".

come on, make them sweat a little over being embarrassed over a bad report.

By Ponderer of Things (not verified) on 07 Jun 2006 #permalink

you had to learn tow rite effectively

I find myself not only wondering what kind of rites we're talking about. I'm pretty sure that there would be enough virgins around to get the job done, probably with at least a couple of spares sitting around just in case.

(NB: yes, I saw the that the space and the w were swapped.)

I find myself not only wondering what kind of rites we're talking about. I'm pretty sure that there would be enough virgins around to get the job done, probably with at least a couple of spares sitting around just in case.

It's like an Iron Law of the Internet, that any post talking about writing skill needs a glaring typo...

Fixed, now.

I realise I am a little late coming to this entry, but I have strong opinions on student writing and so have to share them with you.

Keep the first version, but don't call it a draft or that's what you'll get. It will help the students learn how to write when they see how you've corrected it. I've done a lot of writing in all my courses and I've worked very closely with the writing center to do it. It has taught me a lot.

Next time for the first version, don't correct all the grammatical errors, but choose one or two that are the most glaring. Many errors will be repeated by most of the students. For example, last fall 50% of my Freshman class didn't use commas correctly. So we gave them all information on how to use commas, rather than correcting each paper. Yeah, I got complaints from a few (two out of 50) who know grammar possibly better than me [than I?]. Which isn't much of a challenge as my British education lacked grammar training.

I also insist that students submit both the first report and the final report so that I can see what they made of my corrections.

At the senior level most of my comments are based on flow and organization, not grammar.

Finally, I assume your college has a writing center. You might want to work with them. At a minimum, you could send the students there to get help.

Lab Cat's got a great suggestion about pointing out only a couple issues with each paper, especially for grammar or proofreading stuff.

And the writing center's often really useful, especially if you can meet with someone there ahead of time so they know what you're looking for and can help students with organizational issue and pre-writing.

Have you thought about building some peer-editing into the drafting process? Or basing half the grade on the draft (to make them take it more seriously)? (I hate grading more than responding to papers, though, so I tend not to do that.)

And, as someone who teaches lots of writing, thanks for doing that class; it's really important that faculty in all disciplines work with students on writing and communications skills!