Criteria explained

To understand grading you have to understand what our goal is in putting together The New Humanities Reader. We're interested in helping to foster your ability to make connections--to think synthetically--and we want you to stake out informed, nuanced positions on the most pressing issues of the day. Whether you agree with Drucker or Abram or Tannen or any of the other authors we've included in the reader is not what's important to us; what matters to us is what you can do with the materials you've read. Those writers who can do more with what they've read end up receiving better grades. Believe it or not, it's that simple.

What can you do with the assigned readings?

We think every student entering college should be able to read and understand the essays included in The New Humanities Reader. This, then, is our base line for measuring performance.

A passing performance: here, the writer is able to accurately represent the positions in the assigned readings and can offer one or more fairly straightforward observations about the readings. More often than not, writers at this level stick to generalities--"It's important to protect the environment" or "I agree with Gladwell that context plays a big role in how we understand things."

A higher than average performance: here, the writer moves beyond accurate summary and the tentative formation of a project to critical engagement with the readings, explaining why certain positions are maintained and what consequences follow from adopting one position over another. The focus is less on establishing that the author has read the essays with understanding and more on demonstrating that the essays are being put to use by the student writer to ask a question, pursue a theory, or stake out a new position.

An excellent performance: here, the writer critically engages not just with the assigned readings, but with the assignment itself and the issues it raises. The essay form is used to explore an issue, question, or problem in detail and the result is a carefully argued, nuanced assessment of the student's position. Passing papers tend to make connections using the word "and," better than average and excellent papers tend to make connections that qualify and complicate the issue, using words such as "but," "if," "possibly," and "however."

Whether you are considering our suggested grading criteria in all its detail or at the highly condensed version of it that we've just provided above, you are bound to find the whole issue of what grades represent largely abstract until you look at some real student papers. In the pages that follow, we provide examples of actual papers written in our program and we offer explanations for why the papers have been assessed as they have.

And so, without further ado, we invite you to consider the work a C paper does and does not do.

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