With the end of week eight, the quarter is entering that fatal final phase. All across campus, a certain groggy humorlessness is setting in. Some of its more concrete symptoms include baggy eyes, the distinctly louder chorus of laptop keyboards at Powell Library, steadily declining dress standards and a minor mob at the Bruin Café coffee counter after midnight. It is term paper season, and every quarter it always seems to catch us unaware.
We are entering a period of wasteful and inefficient scholarship, where a lot of students, given the first chance the entire quarter to think for themselves, find they actually have very little to say. Inevitably, within the already fluff-filled meanderings of a 10-page paper, one stumbles upon a certain speechlessness, insurmountable until the very last minute, by page four.
Students are simply unaccustomed to long-form writing, and the problem is written into the system. A number of lecturers assign stacks of reading, which they naively expect students to finish without any incentives past the vague promise of “You will do well.” Then they expect one extended piece of analytical writing from students who have very little experience with it.
Fortunately, there are easy solutions.
For the problem of analytical writing, more regular writing assignments can help, and for the problem of reading, regular reading quizzes.
First, more frequent writing assignments ““ perhaps a page or two every week ““ could slowly acclimate students to the mechanics of analytical writing, which can only be learned through practice.
Students also consistently get feedback, which helps smooth out areas of weakness and rewards them with a concrete indication of improvement. Lastly, it also frames a class early on in more analytical terms, breaking the monopoly of a single midterm.
Debora Shuger, a professor of English who lets her students choose between an extended term paper or writing weekly one-pagers, said she prefers the latter because it cultivates the habit of putting thoughts down in sentences, which is the only way to learn effective writing.
Finally, regular quizzes on the readings should create enough incentive for students to keep up with reading. Several lecturers swear by this method, noting that besides increasing the amount of reading that gets done, students actually become more careful and retentive readers. A study from Purdue University, which shows that testing helps later memory retrieval, supports this idea.
“I would guess it is the single most useful thing I do,” Shuger said. “If I did nothing else but give (students) a quiz on the readings, they would learn quite a bit from the class.”
There is admittedly a paternalism in these suggestions that some may resent. It signals a kind of return to the condescension of high school.
But these may be the protests of the uninitiated. After having been subjected to half a quarter of political science teaching assistant Lisa Mueller’s reading quizzes, students across all three of her discussion sections overwhelmingly returned positive responses, in effect demanding she keep giving quizzes because it forced them to keep up with the reading.
Furthermore, this is already the status quo in South Campus, where the norm is constant testing of a student’s mastery of the material.
Together, incentivizing reading and assigning more regular writing should make that final paper much less daunting.
Students should reach a comprehension of the material and the analytical proficiency to conceive and articulate complex arguments with ease, rendering the term paper a much more useful tool of evaluation and a more worthwhile medium of intellectual expression.
Alternatively, some professors who switch to this system may also do away with term papers. Then the learning becomes a worthy end in itself.
At the very least, the coffee staff at Bruin Café can expect a clientele of scholars, instead of the usual unlettered rabble.