I have to make arguments based on facts I've either learned or researched for history papers. I don't have to come up with something no one's ever learned before, but I do have to come up with an argument I come up with and facts to back it up.
In the age of Google, people really need to stop plagiarizing.
- Thread starter firehawk12
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I have to make arguments based on facts I've either learned or researched for history papers. I don't have to come up with something no one's ever learned before, but I do have to come up with an argument I come up with and facts to back it up.
Whereas in my college experience, all of my papers basically involved regurgitating information. I don't think I wrote a single paper where I had to come up with any of my own ideas, which is probably why I always waited until the night before to write them. They were easy and a waste of time.
I actually had one paper in a Greek History class that was a lot of fun, if not completely retarded. We were only allowed to use "The Iliad" as our source, and each student was assigned a topic. Some students had to research roles of the Gods, others had to research the role of women, blah blah blah.
My topic: Discuss the role of transportation, other than boats (some other kid got to talk about boats) used in Greek history. So, I basically wrote a 7-page paper about feet. There was some chariot stuff thrown in there, too, but it was mostly feet.
My professor gave me an A+ because he said I did a really good job with a really dumb topic (apparently there were more people in the class than he anticipated, and he had to make up extra topics to accommodate us).
My topic: Discuss the role of transportation, other than boats (some other kid got to talk about boats) used in Greek history. So, I basically wrote a 7-page paper about feet. There was some chariot stuff thrown in there, too, but it was mostly feet.
My professor gave me an A+ because he said I did a really good job with a really dumb topic (apparently there were more people in the class than he anticipated, and he had to make up extra topics to accommodate us).
My undergraduate history papers were not just regurgitating facts. My professors were actually pretty tough. And we had to write a lot of papers. Generally all of the history majors were good writers because you just couldn't get through the courses otherwise. It's ALL writing. In the last year there was a larger focus on primary document research. We had to take a Senior Thesis class in which we had to do original research. Maybe my school just had a really good History department.
One class I took was a section of California History that was about 85% filled with Liberal Studies majors (this is the program to become a K-12 teacher), and you could tell the professor was really struggling while grading their papers. They couldn't follow simple format guidelines and were just writing a narration of history instead of actually presenting an argument. He was normally a strict professor, but it got so bad that he had to hand an assignment back to be redone because it was just so unacceptable the first time. The lack of writing skills among my classmates astonished me. I think the professor was REALLY grateful to have me in that class.
So basically, to answer your question Holdfast, I would say it depends on your major and the quality of your individual professors. There's no way someone could have breezed through some of my history classes. But apparently the Liberal Studies program wasn't nearly so demanding. And my boyfriend, who majored in Physics, can't write worth a damn.
One class I took was a section of California History that was about 85% filled with Liberal Studies majors (this is the program to become a K-12 teacher), and you could tell the professor was really struggling while grading their papers. They couldn't follow simple format guidelines and were just writing a narration of history instead of actually presenting an argument. He was normally a strict professor, but it got so bad that he had to hand an assignment back to be redone because it was just so unacceptable the first time. The lack of writing skills among my classmates astonished me. I think the professor was REALLY grateful to have me in that class.
So basically, to answer your question Holdfast, I would say it depends on your major and the quality of your individual professors. There's no way someone could have breezed through some of my history classes. But apparently the Liberal Studies program wasn't nearly so demanding. And my boyfriend, who majored in Physics, can't write worth a damn.
I had a similar experience in my English class. A fair majority of the students were athletes. The entire offensive line (really dumb), a few volleyball players (fairly dumb), and a few wrestlers (ridiculously smart). The professor loved me because I could craft a coherent sentence. That and I loved films as much as she did, so I had no problem discussing and writing about films.
-nobody
What sucks is that grammar and other conventions are such a small portion of the final grade, if they exist at all. I think grading rubrics assume that by the time people reach college they should already know how to write a complete sentence.
From what I've heard from professors, so many students have such poor writing skills that they end up having to ignore it. I could never be a teacher for that reason. Bad grammar annoys the shit out of me.
Well, that's how a research paper (as opposed to an opinion piece) is supposed to go. The key is to put superscripts near all such factual details documenting where they came from.
I wrote a 20-page paper on the Evolution of Trench Warfare for my History of Modern Warfare class----one of only a few history classes I've ever really enjoyed. The requirement was 10 pages, but there was just so much to cover.....that was one of the few papers that I've really enjoyed writing.
I wrote a 13 page paper on the development of Star Trek: Insurrection for a media ethics course. The requirement was 3 - 4 pages.
She sent you the completed papers? She wrote them, not you? If so, that's plagiarism. You represented the work of someone else as your own.
When I was grading, I decided that I had to draw the line somewhere. If they quote the textbook in short-answer questions, I'll give them points. If the copy and paste from a website, that's a zero. Despite being told (over and over), a number of student continue to do the latter.
Pretty much - it get's worse as you go down the league tables - the standards in a lot of our new universities are pretty terrible, they are really super FE colleges rather than universities. You can have departments where half the staff don't have a qualification higher than an undergraduate degree or a post-graduate certificate and their domain expertise is about a week ahead of the students.
All of my work was in Russell group universities, so it was a bit of a revelation when I started to do stuff with new universities.
That's the way it works in my department as well.
Most of the regurgitation takes place on exams, in which students are basically expected to demonstrate that they have been paying attention in class, and have mastered the basics of the topic.
In their written assignments, for which they receive the bulk of their credit, the emphasis is on analysis and argument, right from the start.
Students are gradually introduced to primary sources over the course of their program.
For example: I teach a second-year course on "Approaches to European History" in which students have to write assignments based first on a tertiary source (an historical novel), then a secondary source (a work of historical theory), and finally primary sources (short published works by Enlightenment writers).
I also make them write drills--a model bibliography and a set of model footnotes. If they make even a single mistake, they fail--but they are allowed to revise and re-submit as many times as they can stand it. About a quarter of them regularly fail to complete the bibliography drill, and about a third of them regularly fail to complete the footnote drill.
The most recent version of my fourth-year seminar is an in-depth examination of George Dangerfield's "Strange Death of Liberal England" thesis. My students read Dangerfield's classic, and more recent books on the same period, for discussion in class. Their research papers are based entirely on primary sources--in this case, debates over legislation like the Parliament Act, 1911. Their assignment is to explain the arguments being advanced either for or against these bills, and to discuss the values and assumptions underlying these arguments. This generally requires a bit of additional research, to help them understand hundred-year-old British political discourse.
And JoeZhang--I don't know where you work, but every professor in my department has a PhD. And I work at a pretty small university.
I know what you mean. I have conversations with people working in new universities and they think their student intake criteria and course pass rates are universal ('scuse pun). When I say their students wouldn't pass at Edinburgh and a lot of them wouldn't get in, they are incredulous.
From your use of Professor, I'm guessing you work in the US? Here in the UK, we use to have universities and polytechnics - polytechnics would concentrate on more vocational type subjects and universities would do more academic pursuits. Then it was decided that everyone would go to a university. However the intakes to those places remained the same - people who just about scrapped past their schooling.
Coupled to this, most have pretty poor research profiles, so the incentive for someone with a decent PhD (and if you got onto a decent PHD program, unless you have rocks in your heads, you'll finish with some decent connections in your field) to come and teach the dregs of society in a place is pretty low - especially since teaching does zip for your career, it's just something you have to do that gets in the way of your research, plus of course, academia is pretty snobby to start with and there isn't much kudos attached to teaching at Krusty University. So in some subjects, it's difficult to attract people with PhDs and you have to settle for what you can get.
I make my students (high school English) write their drafts for their essays in class. Then I go over them with the student one on one to assist in whatever they are learning (thesis building, incorporating quotes, etc). Then they can go off and type up their good copies. They must hand in their good copies, outlines, and their drafts that have been corrected (or seen and signed) by me. Failure to do so nabs them a zero. Plagarism issue solved!
Hopefully, they've learned the writing process from me and will continue it on into post-secondary education.
I always really hated this sort of thing when I was in school. I can write a really good essay but I never make an outline, or a draft, I just sit down in front of the computer and start typing it out. Half the spelling errors get corrected automatically and the rest I pickup as I go along. So there really is no draft.
Now this was also 18 years ago when I was in highschool (man do I feel old) so at that time not everyone had computers but I had a ton of arguments with teachers who expected me to have a hand written draft and would sometimes penalize me for not having one.
I also find the level of contact time and student administration mind-blowing. My friend who works at a new university is chasing students about attendance or assignment hand-ins! It's a complete waste of time for someone you are paying 30,000gbp + a year to.
She was recently asked to run one of the courses but as I pointed out to her, every hour she was spending on noddy admin was an hour she wasn't working on publications.
Ooh, your class sounds like so much fun! Now that I am in my more practical courses (studying to be an archivist) I don't do a lot of theory courses anymore. I have one or two coming up though...I didn't realize how much I missed it!
Also, I find it absolutely shocking how many people, even the good writers in my graduate courses, cannot properly format a footnote. I don't get it!! It is RIGHT there in the Chicago Manual of Style, even their website has many examples of exactly how to write it, you basically just fill in the blanks with your information and you're done. I can understand, maybe, for something unusual like some unpublished government document or something, but I don't get why people have such problems with regular books and articles. Every semester when the professor hands back the first paper they say, "You guys did some great research but we really need to go over creating footnotes..." I think, are you kidding me? We've been doing this for years now, people still haven't got the hang of it?
Close. Canada.
What a strange system. We still have the equivalent of polytechnics here in Canada--they're generally called 'colleges'.
That isn't a problem here in Canada--at least, not in my field. We have a large reserve army of academics, and there are numerous PhDs and near-PhDs applying for every opening, even at Krusty University. It's a buyer's market for historians--especially if, like me, you chose the wrong specialization--European instead of, say, Asian, or African.
I grabbed the first tenure-track opening I could find, at a small university in northern Ontario, and had to fight several other candidates for the job. What finally gave me the edge was the fact that I had already worked there once, on contract, as a sabbatical replacement. They already knew me and liked me.
