Paper minimum: 5 pages
Average paper length: 3.5
Is it really that hard to write 5 pages? This is the biggest assignment of the term. There've been rough drafts and stuff. The minimum is 5 outside sources (the average was 4.75).
But. Makes things quicker to grade!
ETA: Here are the medians:
Median paper length: 3.375
Median number of references: 5.
I have a 10 page minimum (in a class where some will turn in 17 pages for their final paper). The first one this summer (turned in early) was 9 pages. I've said that students can take back ungraded early papers and have told 'em to make sure they look at the syllabus for the requirement, but... nothing from this student yet. [The page requirement is to force some work!]
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ReplyDeleteI had a spelling error in my previous post. Not good when commenting on writing!
ReplyDeleteI've always detested page minimums. I have a very succinct writing style (in papers, not necessarily on blog comments) and I feel that if I can get the point across in five pages it only makes my writing worse to invent an additional five pages of fluff just to meet a page-length requirement. Most papers have an inherent page minimum due to their content and if you haven't addressed the topic fully, your paper will show it. But making the limit explicit can cause unnecessary rambling from good students and won't matter to the crappy ones anyway. If the topic is adequately addressed, I couldn't care less how short the paper is.
Page maximums, on the other hand, are excellent for focusing a discussion. As the instructor, and at least semester-length authority on the matter, it's much easier for me to say that a subject can be addressed in 10 pages - if you need 11, you're not doing it right.
MacManUI, I'm actually pretty succinct, too. If the students are 4.5 pages, I'll give them a break. It's the pretty rare student who can make a compelling argument in just 2 pages, though. These are beginners, not grad students.
ReplyDeleteI have to get all "Please don't eat the daisies" on my students when I explain page limits. Title page and bibliography don't count. Illustrations don't count. Massive margins, awkward spacing, 13-point font don't count. Writing 7 pages and 2 lines on the 8th does not make an 8-10 page paper. (While that last one makes me sound picky, I do make some exceptions like Online Ophelia does.)
ReplyDeleteThe place where I'm doing my doctorate has word count, not page count, as the standard. I'm thinking of adopting that the next time I assign a major paper, although I'm sure they'll still find ways to try to "cheat" the system!
With word count, you still have issue of people wanting to count the title page and reference page. I had one assignment that was something like, "Write a letter about X in 200 words" and students were mad that the address didn't count. (Of course, I changed the wording for the next go-around....)
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in HS and still admitted without anonymity that I am a total super-keener, my first lit teacher had a word-limit - and a corequisite grammatical-mistake grading rubric. If the required limit was 600 words, every grammatical mistake counted for -1 point to give a "starting" grade - thus, 10 mistakes meant the highest grade you could receive would be a 90. He then made the mistake of saying that "longer papers lead to more mistakes as there is more room in which to make them, so I will incrementally decrease the penalty as necessary." In short: 600 words = -1 per mistake; 1200 words = -1/2 per mistake; and so on. Note: I went to a college-prep private school in a town known for producing physicians and defense lawyers. His grading system was seen as a challenge, and I won. My final term paper (minimum word length of 1200 words) was 9600 words long and was entitled "The Legend of King Arthur Throughout American Literature" (so I needed every fucking word I wrote and I seriously considered using the topic for a Master's thesis when I briefly toyed with the notion of becoming a medievalist scholar, working in England, and restoring litgurical manuscripts in a musty European library as a profession). Moral of the story: don't set word limits - fuck the morons that count their name as a word - would YOU want to grade a 47-page term paper from a superkeener at the end of the term?!? Hell to the no! My requirement is # of legitimate biological journal references (which to a group of freshmen non-majors is equivalent to asking them to translate the Rosetta Stone into Midlothian...). Good luck, my precious Snowflakes!
ReplyDeleteAs a math teacher, I must say that the average can be misleading. What is the median number of pages and the median number of citations? Now, that will help us better understand what is going on in the class. Actually, both of those numbers together make for an even better look at the class. Then, adding quartiles, quintiles, etc. make it even more interesting... But, nobody cares about math, so...
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch out.
@MacManUI: I detest page counts, too. I used to just provide an estimated number of pages for their paper because students want to know about how long the durn things should be. However, the better papers always exceeded that length and the worse ones were very short... All I've really done is not really make a change for the folks who do well (since they always exceeded it) and torture those who think they can merely skate by.
ReplyDeleteYes, that is evil... but it's not as evil as I get when when I see papers submitted that are still short and (very) off-topic.
writeorama.org. I actually do an assignment based on it, and am known as "the one who makes them write a million words". (My "suggestion" is 23,000 words, but it can be on any crap they choose, as long as I get a weekly update.)
ReplyDeleteStudents usually need to be given page limits because they have no capacity to grasp that they need to write in college (period), let alone how much they NEED to write to cover a topic.
ReplyDeleteIt's a matter of knowledge vs. ignorance.
A student who ignores a suggested page limit of, say, 2-3 pages is not grasping the depth and conciseness necessary for the assignment. Handing in one page means they have not covered what needs to be covered (in my experience, usually followed about 1/2 of the directions of what to cover). Handing in 4-5 pages means they have not learned to edit, revise, or stay on topic.
I used to teach a class whose capstone project was just like Ophelia's: 5-7 pages & 5 academic citations (minimum). It is my duty as an educator to give these students (usually freshmen) the benefit of my experience in letting them know that, should they think they covered everything in 2 pages, something is awry.
Likewise, Beth's prof spoke gospel by cluing his students into the fact that the more you write, the more likely you are to get something wrong. Do you know how often I have seen students do everything right in the first half of their paper only to get it all wrong in the last half (which usually led them over the page max)?
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ReplyDeleteI hadn't considered the "more you write, more you get wrong" angle. I had seen that in action, though, the first two sources are cited correctly but the third isn't, etc.
ReplyDeleteThis is a persuasive research paper. The students in the 3-5 page range tend to do anywhere from okay to great. I've never had a paper that was less than 3 pages that also managed to make its arguments and address counterarguments. It's possible to do this, but I haven't seen it in my classes.
If the department would let me, I'd either change the scope of the content or reduce the page number to 3-5 instead of 5-7. But for now, I gotta do it this way.
Anyway, the median number of pages was 3.375 and the median number of references was 5.
Well, on the plus side, most of the students met the citation requirement. On the bad side, it would seem that more than half did not meet the page requirement. I had my fair share of page requirements and, even with succinct writing, I was always able to make the minimum. Okay, so I would sometimes barely make it, but I never once was more than half a page under the minimum, and very rarely went more than half a page over the maximum (That was usually for papers on topics I had a passion for!). Anyway, it should not be hard to meet a minimum of 5 pages.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch out.
I'd be curious to know the types of references they provided, too. Too often, when I required at least 2 books, plus 2 journal articles, plus 1 subject encyclopedia (i.e., not the Wickywacky nor even the Britannica but e.g. "Ency. of Social Sciences"), etc. -- with brief explanation of why the source was reliable -- I would get papers like the one with a grand total of 2 references, both of them websites pushing (IANMTU) some has-been movie star's theories about the medical profession's well-covered-up conspiracy to addict everybody to carbohydrates.
ReplyDeleteDuuuuuuuuuuude,
ReplyDeleteI *pushed* them to grasp validity of sources, but their laziness usually trumped my attempt to get them to spend their 6+ hours of homework per week on research (I canceled reading assignments during their research period).
They "could only find" pieces of journalism (usually newspaper articles). Not even multi-page magazine articles, but 1-column newspaper articles. Despite my attempt to teach them that, if it's one page long, it's probably not 1/ academic and 2/ critical, theoretical, or worthy of note. Factor in that the newspaper article often referred to a book (good lord, no!) or an academic journal article ("a what? are you sure you taught us what that is?"), both of which could be easily found using the library databases, and you have the basis for my acquisition of the epithet as The Meanest Professor Ever.
See, I actually expected them to learn what I taught them and apply it to the course work. I'm just so unreasonable with my expectations.
I had a student turn in a paper on the anatomy and function of a particular oragn system of the body - in which she used textbooks from 1975 and 1979 as her 2 main sources. Needless to say, they qualified as "legitimate" sources, but they were so out of date they *anatomy* was incorrect!
ReplyDeleteI try and beg and plead with them to come see me to talk references, but no. Inevitably, someone thinks "Joe's Journal of Biostuff" is legit or that EHOW.com is ok since it specifically is NOT Wiki...
I have minimum and maximum line limits in my composition class. If I don't have minimums, they'll write .5 of a page on a 2 pager, 2 pages on a 3 pager, and 3 on a 4 pager.
ReplyDeleteWithout the maximums, I'll get 12 page papers on a 5-page assignment, like the one I got from an ESL student on upgrading the Windows operating system. 12 pages of horribly boring technospeak, filled with ESL errors. I learned my lesson.