Practical Necessities for All Goucher Writing Course Syllabi
These tips are a mixture of things which must be in the syllabus because of faculty legislation, administration policy, and/or legal liability, and things which should be in the syllabus, based on the long-term experience of Goucher Writing Program faculty. The "musts" are on top. If you have additions you would recommend, or want to talk about these or other parts of syllabus design, please contact Arnie Sanders.
If you are teaching freshmen (English 103/104/105), your syllabus must be designed to give students at least one graded assignment, or preferably two or three, that will be returned to them by the fifth week of classes or sooner. No matter what level of students you are teaching, you are not wise if you do not give them graded feedback well before mid-semester, and a serious estimate of their progress by mid-semester, especially if they are in danger of getting below a C. (C- is required for credit in the major.)
Rationale: You have to have those early grades because Faculty Legislation requires you to send an "Academic Progress Report" or APR (using CampusWeb) by the end of Week 6 for each freshman in every course you are teaching. This applies to freshmen who are making satisfactory or even excellent progress, as well as those who are in trouble. Institutional research has led the college to be very concerned about first-year students' ability to self-monitor their progress, even when given grades, and their parents are increasingly involved in checking on freshman students' progress. Though the parents will not receive the APR, itself, unless the students have given them "FERPA" permission, parents will be notified if the student has received an APR that indicates a cause for concern regarding successful completion of the course. Advisers and the Associate Dean receive a copy of the APR, as does the Academic Center for Excellence, which may have tutoring arrangements with the students. All of these people can make your job easier if they know one of your students' is in trouble. Tell them sooner and you will prevent big problems later.
In any writing course, your syllabus must include a statement briefly defining plagiarism and explaining the penalties for it, as well as the reasons why it is injurious to the plagiarist as well as the victims.
Unacknowledged or un-cited representation of the ideas or words of others as one's own is usually always understood to be plagiarism, but your students may never have seen a clear explanation of what kinds of writing can be called plagiarism, or what writers can do to legally use others' ideas or words. If you provide positive alternatives, as well as a sympathetic understanding of the real complexities freshmen can perceive regarding this issue, students will be less likely to act in reckless ways, less likely to conspire against you or their classmates, and more likely to respect their own work. To learn more about the complexities of identifying and explaining plagiarism, and about how to enforce the Goucher College Academic Honor Code, click here for a fact sheet, online workshop, and two useful studies of the problem. Click here for relevant portions of the Academic Honor Code which you may wish to use in your syllabus or in class discussions.
Your syllabus must specify precisely what assignments are graded and how much they count toward the final grade (Faculty Legislation), and the weight of the grades awarded in the last week of the class should not be enough to cause an otherwise successful student to get a D or an F in the course.
Rationale: Students deserve to be able to predict their progress toward completing the course successfully, and they react very badly to doubt, even if it seems needless to you. By the time they reach us, almost all students have been conditioned for over a decade to monitor progress by counting grades, and you cannot break them of the habit in one semester. Some unlearn the habit by senior year, but even seniors can be obsessively concerned about grades rather than learning. Also, courses which measure most of student performance in the last week may encourage "slacking" by students who believe they can turn on a last-minute effort and raise their grade with the final assignment. Cooperate with these nearly inevitable tendencies and make your syllabus communicate clearly what the student needs to do to succeed. Above all, do not "booby-trap" your syllabus with a final portfolio or cumulative essay that is so heavily weighted that it could drop a B or an A student to a D or an F in the final grade. In every class, some freshmen will experience severe emotional and physical crises in the final days of classes in December and May. Try to load some important evaluative events when other instructors have not scheduled exams or final papers (e.g., try the fourth and eighth weeks, avoiding midterms and finals).
Your syllabus should specifically require students to submit notes and rough drafts along with any paper which will be graded. Your assignments also should require students to submit pre-grading drafts for feedback so that you are familiar with the paper's pattern of growth and development, and with the student's "voice." At the start of the semester, you also should assign and retain a copy of an impromptu diagnostic writing assignment.
Rationale: Insurance against plagiarism. The best deterrent to plagiarism is students' respect for their own ideas as intellectual property, but the second best is their certain knowledge that any graded work will have to be accompanied by a "paper trail" of notes and drafts from which it developed. Even if you give only minimal feedback in comments on a rough draft, the draft's physical existence makes less likely the sudden abandonment of topic in the final draft that is a common strategy of would-be plagiarists who have lost faith in their abilities or think they have detected an easy way to avoid work. Whole paper plagiarisms appear to be relatively rare at Goucher, perhaps because students are so often required to submit drafts-in-progress, but patchwork or cut-and-paste plagiarisms are more common. They also are more easily detected if you have prior examples of each student's habits of usage and syntactic variety. Even if you cannot find the source of an isolated theft, a plausible prima facie case can be made by comparing suspect passages against stylistic patterns of rough drafts and an impromptu diagnostic writing sample. Of course, we optimistically expect students' usage and syntax to improve with use and instruction, but we also must be able to disprove claims of overnight improvement that do not follow evidence of proportionate effort.
Your syllabus should include an explanation of the Pass/No-Pass (P/NP) alternative to a final grade in 103, 104, or 105, and it's not a bad idea in any difficult 200-level writing courses where inexperienced students may find themselves struggling to adapt to the conventions of the writing genre you are teaching.
Rationale: If you have students worried about their grades because of scholarships or other financial aid, enough grades below a high B can get them into trouble. This can cause them to fixate pointlessly on the letter grades their writing earns, instead of paying attention to changing the way they write to make their prose more effective. Students who sign up for P/NP by the end of the seventh week of classes (mid-semester) can get a "Pass" in their transcript for the course as long as they would have earned a C- or better. Then their cumulative GPA will be calculated from a smaller number of courses in whose grades they may be more confident. For reference sake, some colleges, including Johns Hopkins, assign no grades to freshmen--it's all P/NP for the first year. When discussing this with students, always remind them that if they chose the P/NP option, they cannot reverse the decision later if, for instance, they find they would be getting an "A" in the course. (If any of your freshmen are in danger of failing the course, advise them about their option to withdraw from the class by end of the tenth week of classes to save their GPA. This results in a "W" on their transcripts, but this may save their financial aid. Putting that suggestion in the syllabus probably would be bad for morale.)
Your syllabus should include a variation of the following statement about the student's responsibility for delivering graded work to you on time in a manner you have chosen:
"Students are responsible for delivering their own writing to the instructor on time in a properly formatted form. If the instructor allows online submission of papers as attached files, students must send the files in formats compatible with the instructor's word processing program, and it is the student's responsibility to verify that the file was properly transmitted. Students should use the "Tell me when this message has been read" option in Outlook, or a similar function in their email program, to make sure the email was received. These students also should request the instructor to verify by return email that the file was attached, and that it opened and printed properly, before they consider the assignment completed."
Rationale: One of the most common sources of disputed final grades is students who assert that they sent instructors final papers by email when their instructors have no trace of receiving the papers. Proving you did not receive a paper is a classic instance of "proving a negative," nearly impossible to do persuasively, so the rhetorical advantage remains with the students unless your syllabus requires them to furnish tangible proof that you have received the paper. An alternative is to demand printed paper submissions at a specific time and place. Even in that case, the first sentence in the "boilerplate" above still is important because of the notorious "I gave it to my roommate and he told me he delivered it to you" scenario. You also can add that you will not accept papers from persons other than their authors unless it is an emergency and the author previously has cleared it with you. Doing nothing about this will eventually cause you trouble.
Your syllabus should specify the occasions and reasons you will accept late papers, and you should consider offering students the same kinds of collegial allowances for life's emergencies that you would hope your colleagues would offer to you.
Rationale: Interacting with students, especially freshmen, offers us an unparalleled opportunity to show them how to practice being adults. This includes modeling the behavior we expect of them, as well as demanding it. If we are unreasonably inflexible, we risk teaching them to imitate a stance often found in two-year-olds. If we shower them with threats and do not show them ordinary kindness, we risk turning them into bad adults or devious late-teenagers, some of whom may attempt plagiarism because of despair or a sense of injured justice. Of course, deadlines in the real world sometimes really are "deadly"--if you miss them, you cannot make it up. However, even the IRS allows late tax returns if you do what is necessary to win the right. Reasonable editors and bosses sometimes do make exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, and we are grateful for their understanding. Think about the assignment from the student's position, as one of perhaps five pieces of graded work which might be due within days of each other. If you want high-quality work, you may need to cooperate with the schedule of the person you are teaching. There are reasons why deadline extensions cannot be granted for any reason, like the end of the semester, but keep in mind that the college specifies the following excuses as normally acceptable reasons to miss a deadline: illness serious enough to require a Health Center or personal physician's attention; death in the family; a Dean of Students' memo describing a compelling reason not covered by the ordinary reasons. Deadlines missed at the end of the semester often can be finessed if you will support the student's petition to the Associate Dean for a late "Incomplete" to avoid having to fail a good student. Also beware students who chronically miss all deadlines--they may have psychological problems that need attention, and the Associate Academic Dean and the Dean of Students should be informed confidentially as soon as the pattern presents itself. Also, file an Academic Progress Report as soon as the pattern appears. Do not wait for the end of the semester.
Your syllabus should require conferences with all your students at least twice a year, just after the semester starts and a few weeks before the end of the semester.
Rationale: Students, especially freshmen, do not readily visit adults in positions of authority in their offices, an event which they associate with visits to high-school principals and dentists. Early in the semester, especially in the fall, they have to be taught to use your presence in the office as a chance to talk one-to-one about their questions and what they believe you are asking them to do. Near the end of the semester, you have a chance for a last minute intervention with students who need specific kinds of direct instruction, giving them correctional advice and explaining things you have noticed they cannot learn in class or by reading your comments on papers. This also helps students to know you as a human being rather than as a classroom authority figure. This may prevent them from developing unreasonable grudges against you for things you cannot control. It also will help you to know students as human beings rather than as members of a problematic group of demanding young adults. That will help you discover how they can best be taught, even if they are not stars in the classroom. If you schedule mandatory conferences, you can cancel a class to compensate for the added contact time, and that class time becomes available for students with difficult schedules. If you can meet more often in conference with your students, you will be able to adjust your teaching to their learning capabilities with far more finesse than you possibly could when addressing 15 of them at once. Conferences do not have to be long if they are frequent. One course design I have tried successfully uses weekly five-minute scheduled conferences instead of long sessions, the equivalent of a regular "chance meeting in the hall" of the sort that so often solves problems or establishes objectives for students and teachers. If you use that method, you can use that time to replace the ordinarily expected three hours of "Office Hours" per week, "Hours" during which not many students typically will visit.
Your syllabus should explain briefly how students can protect their work by using software backup settings, and other strategies that will prevent the loss of work in progress.
Rationale: Students rarely know or care about hardware and software malfunctions that could ruin the files containing their papers. Often, they only have worked with new equipment and their high school assignments have not put a lot of stress on this equipment. Once they get to college, though, work loads increase and the computers/software they brought with them are subjected to a lot of wear and tear. If they do not begin the semester with good back-up practices, they are unlikely to learn them at the end of the semester when the pressure is worst and the likelihood of system failures increases. To see a sample syllabus note from Susan Garrett's English 105 syllabus, click here.