Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Midsemester Project Paper Rewrites: The Deal

When I handed back the longer papers on the poets you researched, I gave provisional grades and the promise of rewriting for a higher grade. I also said I would give you a written explanation of how the rewrites would work. Here it is. You get credit in two ways for the rewrite: as a component of the midsemester project and as part of your final exam grade. As follows:

I. Rewrite the paper and I will use the point totals for the revision to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. In other words, your grade on the first version of the paper disappears, to be replaced by the later version. The grading rubric will be identical to that used on the first version of the paper.

II. The effort you put into the revision will be evaluated and count for 30% of the final exam. To determine that part of the final exam grade, I will use a different rubric from the one that I use to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. I'm e-mailing to everyone the rubric I'll use to evaluate improvement in your paper.

Please note that the grades on I and II are to some degree independent of each other. That is, it is possible to go from a B to a B+ on part one of the assignment by simply cleaning up the mechanical errors noted on the original paper, but that kind of limited improvement will achieve only a fraction of the available points for the final exam grade.

Revised papers will be due 5/8 (Friday) in my mailbox--after the last day of class but before the final exam. Please note that you'll need to hand in the marked-up original of the paper in order to get final exam credit for the revision!

Please feel free to ask questions by responding to this post.

2 comments:

Emily said...

This is not a question this is just a comment of disbelief in my own editing skills of my paper. I cannot believe that I wrote deep fried instead of deep grief. All I have to say is I must have been hungry? Kentucky Fried Chicken anyone? I really wrote deep fried. Wow. I can only imagine what you thought when you read that, because I was startled.

Other editing comment, in order to get a good grade for our final portion we need to have a substantial change in material/structure, instead of just fixing mistakes, correct?

KW said...

For purposes of the final, the revision needs to display major changes beyond simply fixing things I've marked, as explained on the "how to revise for the final" handout.