This week the grading is my misery. One of the questions on my Intro to Hamster Husbandry exam asked students to describe how the industrial revolution affected hamster farming practices in rural England. This got me nearly a hundred nearly identical opening sentences to the effect that:"There are many many ways that the industrial revolution influenced hamster farming practices in rural England and that even reverberate to the hamsters we see around us today..."
Over and over and over until I wanted to gouge my eyeballs out with my red marking pen. But at least I only have to do this once at the end of semester, and I don't have to give feedback, just a grade. So can I get a shout out for the English prof, facing this stuff week in and week out in the hopes that the rest of us get some coherent prose when they're done. Sure they have their quirks. But those who are about to be bludgeoned with butchered English until your brains bleed...
We salute you!
Update: Took a break from grading to sample The Chronic, and came across a piece that seems relevant to the discussion in the comments: Robots are Grading your Papers! Flava as follows:
This managed–often legislated–pedagogy generally fails. Mechanical writing instruction in mechanical writing forms produces mechanical writers who experience two kinds of dead end: the dead end of not passing the mechanical assessment of their junk-instructed writing, and the dead end of passing the mechanical assessment, but not being able to overcome the junk instruction and actually learn to write.
Howard employs the term “patchwriting” to describe one common result of what I have long called the”smash and grab” approach that students employ to produce what we encourage them to pass off as “researched writing:” Scan a list of abstracts like a jewelry store window. Punch through the plate glass to grab two or three arguments or items of evidence. Run off. Re-arrange at leisure. With patchwriting, students take borrowed language and make modest alterations, usually a failed attempt at paraphrase. Together with successful paraphrase and verbatim copying, patchwriting characterizes 90 percent of the research citations in the nearly 2,000 instances Howard’s team studied at a diverse sampling of institutions. Less than 10 percent represented summary of the sense of three or more sentences taken together.
You are preaching to the choir! In fact, I am hanging out on CM for reasons of pure procrastination--can't bear to face the stack of argumentative essays I need to grade. My keen psychic powers are already predicting the opening sentence for most of them: "Blah blah blah has been a controversial topic for many many years, and continues to be controversial today." Seriously--my students are in love with that frickin line. I, however, am in love with my sanity, which is why I put off grading essays until the last possible minute.
ReplyDeleteI took a break from marking English papers to peruse College Misery--thanks for the shout out!!
ReplyDeleteI was just saying to my partner that I can predict the grade range of the paper by the way the student saved her/his paper. Student submit via a course site, and we write explicit instructions on naming their essay and format. It should be saved as "LastnameEssay" and in .docx or .rtf format.
A definite correlation exists between essays entitled "ASHLEY.doc" or "myessay.pdf" and a grade of C. If it's entitled "LastnameEssay.jpg" (as in, they actually name it with our example), I can pretty much guarantee the paper will be a failure.
Agreed. The correctly-named ones may be Bs or As (including Bs the authors of which really, really think should be As, because they followed directions so carefully), but they're considerably less likely to be Cs or below. Some of the incorrectly-named ones will be pretty good, but they will often be sloppy enough in other ways to pull the grade down a bit. The shortcut and empty files masquerading as actual attachments (correctly-named or not) are, of course, Fs, at least until the author replaces them with the "real" file -- but somehow that rarely happens, despite assurances that the real file is on the hard drive of the computer at home/flash drive/best friend's/mom's/dad's laptop, and will be uploaded immediately upon the student's imminent reunion with said device.
DeleteHell to the yes, I agree ...
DeletePlus ... Samuel Gardner Affleck will likely do an acceptable job while Moon Unit Zappa will struggle to achieve basic literacy.
(I know it shouldn't matter how flaky parents are in naming a kid, but I have seen this pattern more than validate itself...repeatedly.)
I may have to switch to this soon, but for now I collect papers on paper. Once, I read papers twice, in random order and then in order of their grade so that I could claim some consistency. Then, I used to look at their previous grades and sort them that way, but I thought that was both too much work and possibly a form of bias. Now I sort them by length. Anything less than half the recommended minimum is a guaranteed F (except for that one kid I had 5 years ago. I miss that kid). Anything between just below the recommended minimum and half the recommendation is probably D range. The papers at the recommended minimum are sometimes C's but not always. Papers between the recommended minimum and maximum are usually C's, and maybe B's. B's and A's are always at the top end of the length pile, though there are always a sprinkling of D's and F's there as well from students who just didn't get it (or got it for free).
DeleteTo some extent, this is a function of the field: I'm sure the correlation is looser in disciplines that don't privilege detail and context as much. But I'm shocked at how damned consistent it is. It's a function of effort, I guess: how much material is there is largely a result of how much they thought about the question, read the material, and cared to make connections.
I have used this same naming convention for years with grad students and I still cannot believe how often they cannot do it right - even after I carefully explain it in a comment at the top of the paper.
DeleteGuess I know how much they read my comments, though....
I don't have a standard format for file name required, because I know students will ignore it. I don't want to dock points for that shit or get demoralized, so I re-name all files with my system. That is how the students get their essay back, with my system. Sometimes, about once per year, I'll get the second paper submitted by some student with the file name in that format, my format. It has so far always been an A. The grade isn't because of that, it just correlates to sharp students.
DeleteThanks for sharing the angst! If you, too, hate these openings, please, please, please let the students know how disappointed you are. When I try to tell them that what they learn in "composition for hamsters" is applicable beyond English class, they always retort with, "But my [insert subject] professor says [insert anything that contradicts whatever I've just told them to do/not do]." We know we're all on the same page, but students still try to play us against each other.
ReplyDeleteI second that emotion. Please, fellow proffies, stop cornering us to ask why students can't write. Instead, lets the snowflakes hear it from your own mouths -- and grades.
DeleteThanks! It's nice to get sympathy rather than "for goodness sake can't you at least teach them not to [fill in speaker's pet peeve]?"
ReplyDeleteI really try to drum into my students' heads that "Throughout history, mankind has. . ." is not an appropriate opening gambit for a college paper. Maybe you're seeing a "narrowed" version of that? If so, I apologize.
What scares me is that I learned NOT to write this way in high school. It was then reinforced in every class in college.
ReplyDeleteSo...what happened? And how much of it is the snowflakes' fault and how much lame-ass colleagues' fault? 70/30?
I think they are taught to write like this in high school now. Formulaic 5-paragraph essay with a formulaic intro that doesn't allow for any creativity or functional thought seems to be the standard in high school.
DeleteWhen they show up in my classes, this is the prose I get. And, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to break them of it. It's like high school was the end all and be all of their knowledge and abilities, and no matter what any professors says, they still produce this crap and claim, "But I learned this in high school."
I give that same lecture. I explain to them that while English has rules for grammar and varying strategies for getting points across, the five-paragraph essay is not appropriate for college writing or any other type of writing other than taking standardized tests. You would have thought I told them Santa isn't real. They like it because it's simple, formulaic, and absolutely predictable. They don't have to put much thought into it.
DeleteIt's when I ask them to read a few of these and then follow up with the questions, "Was that really interesting? Would you have voluntarily read a web page or magazine article written like that in real life?" that the light bulb starts to turn on for some of them.
Lots of my students claim to have no knowledge of the 5 paragraph essay. I had started with that (when I taught writing courses), thinking I could use what they know as a springboard into a new way of writing. While some recognized it (and some even knew it by name), way too many of them had no clue what I was talking about.
DeleteWhich might explain the rather common 3-page, one-paragraph "essays" I get every term.
Since the standardized tests began including the writing portions, all of my students know the 5-paragraph essay. It wasn't the case 15 year ago when I first started teaching, but now, I even get 10-12 page essays in five-paragraph format. That said, I have also gotten (occasionally) the very long one-paragraph essay.
DeleteIt just shows that if professors want students to write, continue to remind them of what essays should entail long after they've taken comp.
It's just a verbal windup on an exam question, the answer to which is presumably a first, and only, draft written under time constraint in class. Restating the question, more or less, is a pretty reasonable way to get started, and the kind of opening that you give isn't on par with the "Since the beginning of time..." openings that are plain dumb.
ReplyDeleteA real essay that is so formulaic could be a problem, but using a formulaic approach on an exam question makes sense and is probably a practice that is enforced all over your school.
On calculus exams it's bizarre how the students seem so out to lunch that they can't even formulate an answer corresponding (however incorrectly) to the question being posed - it's as if you asked them what temperature it is outside and they replied "Paraguay", "Sarah" or "Yellow".
ReplyDeleteIt's when they start talking about the "various positive and negative affects" that I really feel the need to reach for the bottle...
ReplyDeleteOr, they make up words: "This is a comparison and a contrastion....."
DeleteOr analysization.
DeleteI get some "positive and negative effects", but more often the "negative" or disadvantage is a "downfall." "The downfall of bilingual education is that it can be more expensive for school districts" or something like that.
DeleteI invite y'all to re-visit http://collegemisery.blogspot.de/2010/12/winding-up-some-writing-smack-based-off.html.
The five-paragraph essay is a crutch that is very useful in teaching younger (9th and 10th grade) students the purpose and basic structure of a thesis-driven, evidence-based essay. Once they get the hang of creating a thesis statement and develop an understanding of the purpose of paragraph organization and things like topic sentences, they can begin to lose the crutch and start producing more sophisticated essays. Though a paper that follows the five-paragraph structure does not need to be simplistic; there is room there for considerations of ambiguity and contrary evidence, and I expect that consideration of my sophomores.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of intellectual development, there is a huge difference between a high school sophomore and a junior. The ability to think abstractly, make broad comparisons, handle ambiguity comfortably, and even recognize sarcasm seems to develop somewhere around age 16 or so, but these things need nurturing. A high school whose upper-level courses are doing the same things skill-and content-wise that the freshman and sophomore courses are doing is a place that will stunt the academic growth of its students, who will then show up in our college classes with childish writing and thinking skills. (And AP courses in the humanities are a big culprit. Just when students are able to handle some intellectual nuance, AP history, e.g., slams them back into a world of rote memorization and formulaic essays).
I work at a very good high school, and developing and cultivating intellectual maturity in our students is a constant effort. I would imagine that at schools with fewer resources and less motivated and/or prepared students, the task must be nearly impossible. One other thing my school has that many public schools don't is an administrative tolerance for maintaining high academic standards (although we offer far more AP courses than our teachers care to teach).
I am *so* with you on AP. I have argued so many times that we should not give college credit for AP, but it's losing battle. I didn't take any in high school; did independent studies instead, which is not possible at a large school.
DeleteBelieve me, most independent school humanities teachers loathe AP tests and wish that colleges would stop giving credit for them so our college counselors could stop insisting that we offer them.
DeleteMy experience (in the 80s) with AP courses (English and history for me, though they also offered AP math) was good--I got a lot out of them. I didn't get college credit, though. That must be a newer thing.
DeleteI was in high school in the 80s and my memory was that you did get college credit for them, in the form of being able to skip intro classes, but maybe I misremember. I took summer college classes instead, too, because that was REAL college-level work.
DeleteOur college offers college credit for them. Then they get to skip Comp I and II (depending on the score they achieve). Then I get them in a class and lo and behold... a five-paragraph essay.
DeleteI was in HS and started college in the 80s. Different colleges had different policies regarding "skipping" freshman comp (for instance) if you took AP English. Some schools disallowed it altogether, some required a 4 or 5 on the AP exam, and some allowed as low as a 3. But it varied by school.
DeleteI hope that still is the case.
My (large public) high school offered only a few AP classes: Physics, Calculus, Biology, English Lit, and US History. I took two, and I was intimidated when I first arrived at college and heard of people who took four or five. However, I am convinced now that the AP courses at my high school were more rigorous than average, and that my school chose to only offer AP courses in departments with experienced and well-reputed teachers.
DeleteAt my undergrad, a 4 or 5 on most AP exams allowed a student to place out of the intro courses in that department. However, the AP English Lit exam was worth two general elective courses. Still not sure what that meant; maybe I could have simply not taken two non-required courses and gotten credit as if I did? I ended up taking slightly more than the usual number of courses, so those credits didn't end up doing anything, I guess. They still appear on my transcript though.
HPP is right of course that a time-pressured exam is no place to expect polished prose, so I'm not really grading for it (much - it still needs to be coherent). If students feel rushed though, I can't for the life of me figure out why they'd spend time to write the question back out again. What I do notice is that they often have time for a complete brain-dump where every factoid they can remember about (a) hamsters, (b) industry (c) revolutions and/or (d) England spill across the page in teensy weensy handwriting.
ReplyDeleteI keep hoping that a few of them will use some of that time to digest the material, organize it a bit and demonstrate some synthetic understanding. A few do. I love those ones. Trying to explain to the rest why "but I wrote so much" didn't get them full marks should have been one of the labours of Hercules.
It's partly an issue of mindset - they figure that in an exam, the more you write the more marks you get is the name of the game. The idea of stopping (egad!) to think (double egad!) for a while and writing a shorter (what are you Tea-Partying nuts?) more focused answer just never crosses their minds. They see exams as something between a business transaction (if I do X, you give me Y) and a BF Skinner experiment (if I press these buttons, the food pellet rewards appear).
Rubrics are definitely part of the problem, and I don't use them. I can see how they appeal in creating some even-ness across multiple markers (such as lab TA's in a big intro to hamster biochemistry course - which is unfortunately where most science majors get their writing instruction). But if there's any justice in the cosmos, the edubabble wankers who want rubrics for everything will spend eternity amid the flames reading five-paragraph essays.
What's even more fun is the edubabble wankers who develop rubrics that have "professional-standard writing" at the top end, and "good-quality student writing" in the middle. Then students whine like crazy when you hold 'em to the rubric. "I'm not used to being graded like this." Honey, you need some tougher teachers.
DeleteI use rubrics, largely as a matter of letting students know what part of their score comes from where. But the rubrics I use are loosey-goosey and give me plenty of leeway for judgement.
In an upper-year assignment, we have our students compare their work to the Uni's rubric of literal descriptors. I think we were hoping for some humility in the face of the official standards. Instead, we get a whole lot of barely functioning students assigning themselves "exceptional" grades.
DeleteThey do that when they grade each other, too. It's typical overconfidence born of incompetence.
DeleteIP - in my senior class, I have students do a peer review using the same rubric I use on their work. They've been conditioned by getting my comments on several papers but in general, they are slightly harder on their peers than I am and they think I'm an ogre.
DeleteOf course, some also think the course would be easier if I used 1000 points rather than a 100 for a course total, so I don't know how much I trust their judgment.
Just kidding - I know exactly how much I trust their judgment.
Thank you. And to echo ^^Contingent Cassandra^^ thank you for not blaming us because they're dullards in your classes, too.
ReplyDeleteI spent 4 hours on Sunday slogging through a section of comp essays. Lots of Cs and Ds, which leads me to wonder how the hell they're able to pass their other classes.
"Data" is not the plural of "anecdote," so I dunno how anyone can possibly generalize about what's taught in high school. Here's my anecdotal experience:
ReplyDeleteMy son graduated--without much distinction--from a Southern California public school last year, and his English classes did NOT focus exclusively on the five-paragraph essay. His English teachers were all anywhere from pretty good to really good. Because my son is a reader, he's also a good writer, but overly fond of turning in late work.
The five-paragraph essay seems to be nearly everyone's bugaboo in these comments, but, as Surly Temple points out, it's just a condensed form of what's pretty standard in academic writing. Focusing on this form only is a starting point, but I don't think that it's an ending point for most comp teachers, whether they teach in high school or in college.
As far as AP classes go, my son's experience (which is generally the same for my colleagues' kids) is that AP = not much that's "advanced," and a lot more busywork.
Here's a thing that troubles me: How do we GET "upper-year...students" who are "barely functioning"?
ReplyDeleteI know, I know; perhaps the stuff of a different conversation, but on the other hand, perhaps the answer to it is at the root of the issue (as in THE ISSUE).
Like Surly Temple, I teach in a good high school. That means my courses fill my classroom with an incredibly varied population--under the very best of circumstances, there is less intellectual diversity in my upper-level Advanced English 12 class, but there is a profound and daunting variation in my AIS (Academic Intervention Services) English 11--an upper-level course in terms of cohort, but populated by the district's most skills-deficient students.
Those seniors? They will (sparsely) populate your classrooms next year and for several more down the road. Their skills are high; their personal motivation is high; their interest in growing intellectually is high; their ability to wrangle the language they dream in is impressive. They have been strong students since before they entered public school, and they have been given enrichment opportunities all along the way that have helped them perform regularly beyond the State's--and sometimes ever our, their teachers' expectations. There are twenty-four of them coming to you from my district, from a class of 160. When they get to you, they will spread out among your disciplines. They will write those papers you salt through your pile to give yourself a reward after plowing through the dreck...
...The dreck that NONE OF WHICH should come to you from any of the 17 who are enrolled in that OTHER class--they cannot write. I take that back--they have grown SO MUCH across this year so far!--but they cannot nor ever will be able to write an academic response to a topic/prompt/task according the "standard" in even the trite and formulaic 5-paragraph essay format. If the gods stay with me, they MAY be able to get enough of the multiple choice questions correct to supplement their ability to apply as much as they remember under pressure of that formula to pull off a 65 on that big test they face as a graduation requirement in 6 short weeks' time.
But some of them WILL end up in your classrooms, though not too many, and I hope you are gentle with them when you encourage them to consider a trade school. And I hope you are flamingly indignant and scathingly indicting when you address your admissions people.
The majority of kids who come to you will most resemble my high school freshmen: They will be capable but undisciplined beyond their personal passion(s), accomplished but unwilling beyond their personal passion(s), educable but uncommitted beyond their personal passion(s). MOST will belong in your classrooms, though their best performance will be reserved for those classes on subject matter about which they give a damn. SOME will not belong in your classrooms; again, take that up with you admissions people.
Of all who are appropriately enrolled in your classes, some few will do stellar work and write stellar papers, many will do good work and write good papers, slightly many more will for passing-fair/competent work and write that kind of papers, and some will fail to meet that standard. Give them the effing grades they deserve--I do--and they will sort themselves out.
The problem with taking it up with admissions people, for me, lies in the fact that I teach at an open-admissions institution.
DeleteYes, we have a test that helps the admissions people place students in whichever level of HamsterComp they're suited for, but it's flawed (it sucks eggs, actually) and we need to do multiple measures (i.e. a short timed essay) to augment the placement test. There's no money to pay me to do the multiple-measures assessment; my pay is already lower than 83% of my colleagues at other two-year institutions, so I ain't workin' for free, no matter that it would help some of our students. So there's the rub.
I have students right now in the core-credit comp course that cannot formulate a sentence from one end to the other, much less follow directions to summarize and analyze part of a text. I have no doubt that about 18% of my current crop will be taking this course again (the required grade is a C for credit/transfer).
I don't know what's going on--and I don't think HS teachers are to blame, because y'all can only do so much with what the system is set up to do--and I don't know if they are educable.
I have hope, though, which is why I'm settling down with the next stack of comp essays right now. And as Keithy, the bodyguard character in _Idoru_ says, "I will sort them right fucking out."
I think that on some levels, students I get as freshmen in college are operating as high school freshmen, too, drawing on that experience to get them through their first year. When I get them as Juniors and Seniors, they seem like different beasts.
DeleteAnd I LOVE me some Wm Gibson! :o)
I know people may think that McSweeney's is a bit twee, but this one is particularly germane to the discussion here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-stages-of-grading
And and oldie but a goody:
http://notthatkindofdoctor.com/2010/10/the-five-stages-of-grading/
Thank you for this. Seriously.
ReplyDelete"X is a serious problem throughout society. Since the dawn of time, mankind has struggled..."
ReplyDelete"When people think of X, they usually picture...But in reality, what most people don't know is that X is an ancient and complex thing..."
"To truly comprehend X, we must first understand Y."