Grading Rubric
There is no single way to organize or write good papers for my courses, but every good paper will develop a central argument from evidence taken directly from the readings. Even if the prompt to which you’re responding asks several questions, it is your job to tie your answers together into a single thesis so that the result is one coherent paper, not many separate, long bullet points presented together. The most likely models for such papers are probably the sorts of papers you write for humanities (history, literature, etc.) courses.
Because I need a way of marking down late papers, papers in this course are given a numerical grade out of 100. I determine your letter grade first, then convert it to the highest possible number that would correspond to that letter, so that: A = 96, A- = 93, B+ = 89, B = 86, B- = 83, and so on.
The general rubric for the grades is as follows:
A+: a well-written, original argument that shows me something in the texts that I’ve never seen before
A: a clear, well-written argument that incorporates original insights not raised in class discussion
A-: an A paper with some logical or grammatical errors
B+: a grammatically competent, well-written summary of the readings and class discussion, but without much originality or analysis
B and B-: less competent, less well-written, or with less analysis
C+: unclear argument, serious textual misinterpretations, or very poor writing
C and C-: more significant errors than the C+
D and below: failure to address the assignment, total incoherence
There is no single way to organize or write good papers for my courses, but every good paper will develop a central argument from evidence taken directly from the readings. Even if the prompt to which you’re responding asks several questions, it is your job to tie your answers together into a single thesis so that the result is one coherent paper, not many separate, long bullet points presented together. The most likely models for such papers are probably the sorts of papers you write for humanities (history, literature, etc.) courses.
Because I need a way of marking down late papers, papers in this course are given a numerical grade out of 100. I determine your letter grade first, then convert it to the highest possible number that would correspond to that letter, so that: A = 96, A- = 93, B+ = 89, B = 86, B- = 83, and so on.
The general rubric for the grades is as follows:
A+: a well-written, original argument that shows me something in the texts that I’ve never seen before
A: a clear, well-written argument that incorporates original insights not raised in class discussion
A-: an A paper with some logical or grammatical errors
B+: a grammatically competent, well-written summary of the readings and class discussion, but without much originality or analysis
B and B-: less competent, less well-written, or with less analysis
C+: unclear argument, serious textual misinterpretations, or very poor writing
C and C-: more significant errors than the C+
D and below: failure to address the assignment, total incoherence