How Did You Do?

Here's how we would describe the work that the student has done in this paper:

The student writer has a clear project. She has identified points of agreement with the three assigned authors--de Waal, Guinier, and Kaldor--and she wants to establish what she sees as the limit to their arguments. The organizational structure for the paper is straightforward and easy to follow: each author is allocated two paragraphs, one charting out ideas the student writer agrees with, the next pointing out the ideas the student writer has more difficulty accepting. Finally, the paper has "several moments of solid work with text:" each author is allowed one representative quote that the student writer then incorporates into her project of identifying points where she can agree with the assigned authors.

Thus, this paper is better than a C paper for the following three reasons: the student writer consistently establishes her position throughout the paper; the paper is coherently organized from beginning to end; and the student's work with text goes beyond establishing connections between the readings to illustrating the student writer's own project.

This paper does not approach the B-level because the position the student has chosen to stake out involves nothing more than accurately representing the arguments of the assigned authors and noting her reservations about these arguments. Consequently, this paper does not build towards any insight beyond observing that all these ideas are appealing "to a point." The quickest way for this student writer to move her writing up to the next level is for her to begin to consider how de Waal, Guinier, and Kaldor might respond to her objections. How might Kaldor, for example, counter her concerns about world courts? What might Guinier say to the charge that she has set out to "completely scrap[] the majority rule model"? The way of arguing represented in this paper captures the most common attribute of papers in the C-range: a point of disagreement is identified by the student writer and the discussion is brought to a close. In papers at the B-level and above, these moments of disagreement come to serve as opportunities for thinking further about the issues at hand: if not a world court, then what? If not propotional voting, then what? This move to consider the implications of one's own position is a move to explore what we term "the action horizon"--that place where the ideas in the paper are understood to have some potential impact or influence on the world outside the classroom.

We think venturing out on to the action horizon is the best way to make education more than the rote activity of fulfilling requirements towards a degree. What difference does it make whether someone thinks X or Y? The strongest papers, we believe, find ways to consider the consequences of thinking about the world one way rather than another--find someway, in other words, to show that it does matter how one thinks about the conflicting ideas expressed in The New Humanities Reader, by our colleagues and peers, and by the instituions we inhabit. So what do the best papers do? They value their own ways of thinking and they make a credible case that others should value those ways of thinking as well.

We hope you agree that it's worth giving this kind of thinking a try.

Good luck!

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