Grading

Grading papers and exams sucks. I always have high expectations for the work that will come out of undergraduates in a 400-level class. I don't expect them to write publishable papers or even come up with a new or original way of looking at a skeleton. But I do expect them to write in complete sentences, to check their paper for typos (particularly of anatomical terms), complete all aspects of the assignment, and, most importantly, fully cite their work and include a bibliography. Do undergraduate classes no longer require in-text citations? Only one student out of 15 cited things properly in her final paper for me: author, year, page number (if relevant). I gather that some of them are being taught a weird style, like APA, but honestly, I don't care about style as much as I care that they don't seem to know when it's appropriate or necessary to include a citation. They don't include them when they first mention a methodology they're using (e.g., the Phenice method for sexing the os coxae); they don't include them when they paraphrase a sentence from a published work (and, yes, it's easy to tell when this occurs); but most egregiously, some of them don't include them when they use quotation marks. These are juniors and seniors. Mostly anthropology majors. In a class that's geared towards senior majors and graduate students.

Maybe it's because I came out of an undergraduate program in classics that I learned quite quickly in my first year how to write a proper college paper, with appropriate citations and bibliography. I learned how to track down references in the days before fully online card catalogues and Google Scholar. I learned that quality work is rewarded not only by a good grade but by a sense of accomplishment at a job well done. But I went to college to enrich myself, not merely to get a B.A. Maybe in today's world where everyone needs a bachelor's degree to get a decent job, professors aren't holding students to as high a standard as I was. Maybe it's only classicists and other pedants who insist on papers free of typos, who won't stand for a simplistic comparative essay, who value a student's ability to make an argument rather than regurgitate what the textbook says.

But after reading 15 papers in which not even one student looked to a source outside of their primary textbooks (and did not even look to any of the books listed on the syllabus, which were on reserve in the library), I have lost much of my faith in undergraduate students' ability to write even the simplest paper. I will continue to hold them to the high standards I was taught (and yeah, I still have papers from my freshman year of college - they're far more rigorous than anything I've seen in years from my students). My hope is that they will take away from my class not only the ability to age and sex a skeleton but the ability to think critically about the methods they use to do so - and to be able to write coherently about their reasoning. But if they're not even being taught the basics of paper writing before they get to me, is it really my responsibility to teach them that or, worse, to condescend to grade them on what they know rather than what I think they should know?