Between Fields

I'll do a little recruiting, since I happen to be in a funded MA program: Truman State University offers graduate assistantships for its MA English students, including a tuition waiver and generous (for such a small town) stipend. You're also actually teaching a class and you are the instructor of record, which is pretty rare for an MA program. They look favorably upon applicants who didn't get their UG degree here (since so many of us did), as well. Master's degrees are the highest degrees offered here, so there's no PhD population to compete with for funding, either.

After also speaking to the professor mentoring the TA's, I did end up giving these students each a D- (and one got a D). I adjusted the rubric to emphasize certain other categories over citation, but made my displeasure evident. I can't remember if I mentioned that the assignment prior to this one was an exercise in summarizing and citing an article, in which some of these students had similar issues. This assignment was an exercise to see if they could cite multiple sources and provide the appropriate citation and attribution. On meeting with one of them, I upgraded his grade to a C-, after he showed me how and why he made the mistakes, and pointed out that he'd attributed things in other ways. The others didn't come to talk to me, so I didn't work with them on their grade. I do agree that it's not possible to expect the same work from a freshman as an upperclassman, but this institution emphasizes rigor at all levels, and at least in theory we've got "highly selective" admissions standards. I think I'd done a pretty good job of emphasizing my point that citation is mandatory. Surely, for this next assignment they've understood the message. I think next semester, I'll build in more revision. Currently, they can only revise the two medium-weighted papers in the middle, not this one I had issues with or the final research paper.

I'm the instructor of record, so I grade everything. Since I only have 20 students (yay for small, liberal arts and sciences institution!), I can usually grade fairly quickly. For short assignments, I grade them immediately after class during my office hours. That's easy for me, though, because they're completion (as long as they actually followed the directions and I can read it). That's probably not so possible in fields other than composition. For long assignments, I read through all of them, and then sort them by how they "feel," in terms of strong, middle, and weak, and then start grading from the bottom and work up. It's best to save something good for the end, so you're not completely worn out and grumpy. I do use a rubric, but I also scribble comments on their drafts. I did a seminar project on student feedback, and as someone else said: the more you write, the less they read. It depends, though, what the learning outcome from grading is: are you wanting them to revise, or are you justifying a grade? For my first two papers, I don't let them revise and so my minimal marking is even more minimal than normal, just enough to point out a few good things they did and a few bad things they did. Later papers get more detail, because they can revise them.

We're having an in-class drafting day for the next assignment tomorrow, so I had considered talking to them individually, then. I use a rubric that is based directly from the learning objectives on my assignment sheet, and I've got it marked to explain exactly why they lost points in specific categories. Luckily for them, the paper's only worth 10 percent of their grade. I think I'm leaning more towards a very carefully-justified F and personal meeting, without an opportunity to redo it. I think, ethically, I'd have to give the whole class the opportunity to revise, if I did for these folks.

I'm a GT/RA at a liberal arts and sciences university; I'm the instructor of record for a first-year composition course, so I do all the grading, syllabus-making, etc. I recently got back my second set of essays. The assignment was simple: write a profile on something you're not familiar with, be it person, place, or event. The only caveat was that it had to be something local, so that they could do primary research. They also had to include a secondary source to support their paper. I had four people include no bibliography and no in-text citations. They all declined to have an individual consultation with me before it was due, and also failed to cite things in their first paper. My first thought is to hand out a few F's and move on with my life. My second thought is to mark up the rubrics as F's (or incompletes) and give them 24 hours to fix it. (They wouldn't normally be able to revise this paper, only the ones later in the semester that are worth more.) I'm torn, because I want to give people chances to succeed, but I also have said probably thousands of times that information that didn't come from their blessed brains must have a citation with it. I can't decide if the F itself is a teachable moment, or if I should let them revise (and in that way possibly undermining my own authority). What would you do, if a student didn't follow the directions to the degree that the paper was basically ungradable? (The average for these four is approximately 54 out of 100, because of all the areas on the rubric where the citations were important.) Is it unfair to the rest of the class to give them an ultimatum like that? Keep in mind that they are first-semester freshmen.