Frequent Undergraduate Papers: Means for Sustaining Interest

This is the rhythm of academic work: 12 weeks of lectures, followed by reading period with a term paper of 15 to 25 pages, ending with the final examination. The purpose is to educate. Does the rhythm suit the purpose?

Except for the ritual of the exam, the student is asked to respond to course work primarily in the one long paper, scheduled after the end of the lecture part of the course. Until then, he just glides along, listening, taking notes, reading, taking more notes, passively ingesting knowledge, never asked for the evidence of his personal involvement in his education. Only after the lectures are over and the course is at an end is the student asked to report on what he thought, how he felt.

The result in the student's term-time work is a performance uninspired by a sense of active, personal engagement. At his best the student is simply dutiful, at his worst moribund. If he falls behind in his reading during the lecture part of the term, it is primarily because the mechanics of course work discourage ongoing, direct involvement in the material.

The traditional pattern of course work--postponing the student's contribution to his learning until the term is nearly ended--implicitly denies what all students know from their experience: education functions best as a dialogue, a running conversation between student and teacher in which both are actively engaged in the same material at the same time. Education fails and apathy sets in when this dialogue breaks down. Why copy down the lecturer's critical responses to "The Wasteland" before you have read the poem, before you have your own responses to measure his against? And of what satisfaction to the teacher is addressing passive spectators? Reuben Brower, professor of English, complains: "I can't stand lecturing about things people aren't engaged in."

Shorter Papers

In Brower's courses papers are shorter, and assigned at frequent intervals during the term-- thus fostering student involvement in the issues of the course, at the time that the material is being considered in lectures, rather than during reading period or exam period. When the student is given incentives to read and write about what his professor is discussing in lecture, there is a renewal of the dialogue.

Assigning several shorter papers during the term helps primarily to teach methods, approaches, modes of treatment and attention, rather than to convey a substantive mass of knowledge.

The single long term paper, on the other hand, usually seeks to test the student's ability to explore a specific problem in depth, bringing together a relatively large amount of material to bear on a single topic. (The long term paper will usually involve extensive research and run from 15 to 25 pages, whereas the short term-time paper is usually less than 10 pages long.)

Pre-eminently, the average student term paper reflects a lack of personal involvement of the writer in his subject. The personal response is blurred, buried, missing altogether. Unengaged in the work of the course during the term, the student has neither the time, nor the prior interest in the material (when he sits down to write) to cultivate his own responses to the reading and to write enthusiastically about them. What graders report missing in term papers is the sense of an immediate student relationship to the work at hand. This is a relationship that grows up through time, that must be nurtured and developed from the very beginning of a course. It rarely is.

"Insufferable Dullness"

What are the hallmarks of this failure of personal engagement in student term papers? David T. Little-john, a second-year graduate student in English, read about 80 long term papers during May for two upper-level English courses. He talked of their "insufferable dullness," lamenting "the absence of any imaginative involvement" on the part of the writer. The result: "commonplace topics and commonplace papers." In slightly different terms, Professor William Alfred described what is essentially the same problem, noting the students' habit of suppressing their own perceptions and immediate responses, holding back what they think and feel. Rather, in writing term papers, students often try to write what they think will please the reader, asking themselves: What does he want us to see? What does he want us to feel? The immediate personal response is never cultivated, never expressed. It gets lost in the desire to please, to be "safe."

Something more than the lack of personal involvement in course work is suggested in these comments. They testify, also, to other ill effects of leaving papers until the end of the term. First, writing only one paper for a course gives the student no chance to improve in his ability to argue a point, to develop his responses, to write lucidly. Also the student feels a great pressure to write a safe, conservative paper when it is the only one in the course. He tends to be thorough and cautious, not daring to take a chance on a dubious theory or a fresh approach. Too much of the grade depends on the term paper for the student to feel free.

If students learn through a continual dialogue, assigning the term paper due after the end of the course gives the student no chance to learn from graders' comments. In large lecture courses, these comments take the place of frequent personal communication as the only means for the teacher to maintain his end of the dialogue. The student can learn nothing of immediate usefulness from the grader's comments on his term paper, since he gets his paper back only after the course is over. If it is true that improvement requires continuing personal instruction and correction, how can such a system help the student? Often he receives his paper back as late as three months after the course is over.

And the grader, harried by having to read and grade as many as a hundred papers within a single week, must restrict his comment to a few marginal notes and a perfunctory summary at the end. The summary often goes something like this: "Able job. Well-organized and effectively argued. Especially strong in the middle section." Given such vague, abstract criticism, it is no wonder that students look forward only to learning their grades when they go to pick up their papers. What can anybody learn from such comments? Close critical comment is valuable, especially when made available to the student while the course is proceeding, so that he may learn from his mistakes.

Stress on Improvement

Periodic writing assignments, supplemented by intelligent and detailed criticism of each piece, serve to maintain student engagement in the material of the course while it is going on. Frequent short papers give the student an opportunity to hit his stride, and early grades are often discounted when his record shows improvement. The stress here is on improvement, on education, not on testing, as with the single term paper. Knowing that each paper will not count so heavily in terms of a grade, the student is encouraged to write more daringly and imaginatively. He has the chance, also, to purge his writing of that turgid idiom, Scholar-speak, a variant of English considerably less clear and lucid than Time-style.

Professor Samuel Beer considers that the six term-time paper assignments in Social Sciences 2 are "the most important pedagogical device in my course." His section men, Michael Tanzer and Norman Pollack agree, stressing the improvement over the course of the term of their students' ability to present a coherent argument, to marshal facts to support it, to organize effectively, and to express themselves clearly. Reuben Brower assigns four or five papers in his English 162, as does Robert P. Wolff in Social Sciences 140. Richard Poirier, in his courses on American and English literature, is another who gives frequent paper assignments, believing the act of writing to be the most important way of transforming feelings and intimations into real knowledge.

Frequent writing exercises sustain and periodically invigorate student enthusiasm. But they represent only half of the dialogue by which students learn. What of the teacher?

In the large lecture course, students ordinarily lack access to the Great Man, who is busy with his own scholarship. But for most undergraduates, talking with interested graders and section men would prove no less valuable. Thus one immediately practicable way to restore the educational dialogue in the large, upper-level lecture course is to have more graders; two graders for a lecture course of 200 is not sufficient for the kind of continuous interaction described here. The problem is more than one of more than one of more men and more money, however. Graders in courses money, however. Graders in courses without sections must be encouraged to conceive of their role in more generous terms than they have in the past. They must do more than record paper and exam grades; in short, must be willing to talk to students. Given a ratio of about one grader for every 25 or so students, more papers could as assigned. Before writing each paper, students would be urged to visit a grader to discuss their proposed topics.

Discuss Paper First

As graders like David Littlejohn have said, talking about a paper before writing it, especially in the case of longer papers, can help a student to find a subject that will genuinely appeal to him and engage his interest. The grader can often suggest new and fresh ways of treating material.

After the paper has been written, what then? Comments should show the student what he has done wrong, and suggest what to do the next time. The criticism on most term papers is insultingly brief, considering the amount of work put into the paper. "Able job," "fine work," "sloppy reasoning"--these comments do not educate. Ideally, as Robert P. Wolff noted, students should be writing papers every week, and going over them word by word with an instructor. Courses cannot fulfill this function--more properly reserved for tutorial work--but course graders might be able to talk with students about their papers, if there were more men among whom to divide the work. If the comment on a paper does not suggest in some way what to do next, it serves no purpose. Epithets do not educate.

Here again it is plain that the assigning of one long term paper to be handed in at the end of a course, militates against any kind of worth-while communication and instruction. Dividing the paper work through the course of the term would, incidentally, relieve the burden of the grader in reading hundreds of final examinations and term papers at the end.

More frequent paper assignments and more frequent contact with the heretofore anonymous men who read them would encourage a more active sense of student engagement in work as it goes along. Academic suicide, academic abandon, all of the varieties of student alienation from course work can be alleviated by greater concern with matters of teaching, by a dedication to the restoration of the student-teacher dialogue that is stilled in the lecture hall.