My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior\/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.<\/p>\n
Students in all majors are also required to take five “Writing Across the Curriculum” classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of these classes are offered by the English and History departments, while science and engineering departments offer very few WAC courses. This leads to a fair amount of grumbling among science majors, who point out that students in the humanities can meet the requirement easily, without having to take courses outside their field of interest, while science majors need to go over to English or History to pick up their writing courses.<\/p>\n
I have a small amount of sympathy for this argument (though I personally didn’t have any trouble with taking English and History courses, back in the day), and I wanted to make sure I would have enough students register for the class to be sure of being able to offer it (officially, we need six students to sign up for a course in order to get teaching credit for it), so I agreed to make Quantum Optics a WAC class. As I used to be on the committee that certified such classes, I knew what the requirements were, and set the syllabus to include at least one short “article summary” paper, and a longer final research paper on a topic related to the subject of the class.<\/p>\n
However, it also turns out that either the subject is really interesting, or students like me (probably because I’m a sap, and will agree to teach a WAC class for science majors), because I ended up with 17 students in the class, easily double what I expected. Which leaves me in an unusual spot for a physics professor: I have actual papers to grade, instead of just exams.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I realize that 17 papers to grade is a light term for humanities faculty, but it’s way more than I wanted to deal with. Look at it this way: I’ve got 17 students, who had to write 10-15 pages each, which works out to 170-255 pages. That’s basically a novel’s worth of student writing about research topics in Quantum Optics.<\/p>\n
On top of that, it’s a novel I’ve already read, because I had them do mandatory rough drafts, and met with them individually to go over the drafts. With a few exceptions, there aren’t going to be huge structural changes in any of these papers before the final draft, and the few that did require large-scale reorganization won’t have gotten as much as they need, so I’m basically going to be reading the same thing I read last week, with some of the spelling errors fixed. And I have to find some way to assign grades to these that will work for both a paper on ion trap quantum computing and a paper on the Aharanov-Bohm effect (I put it on the list of possible topics because there’s a short bit on it in the textbook– I didn’t think anybody would pick it…).<\/p>\n
I probably ended up putting too much effort into sentence-level stuff in the drafts, but then that’s the only way to learn to write. My own professional writing skills were developed only through the process we called “paper torture” at NIST, where someone would write a draft of a paper, and then the co-authors on that paper would get together and rip the draft to shreds, questioning every point of grammar, and every little word choice. To get a paper through that process, you had to learn to write effectively, and fight for every phrase. Some of the students looked a little bemused at some of the things I was challenging in the draft meetings, but compared to what I would do for a journal article, this was a walk in the park.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’m going to try to take a more… holistic view for the final drafts, and read them through on a higher level, without sweating the grammar mistakes quite so much. This will probably fail miserably, but I’m also going to have final exams to grade from my intro E & M class, and I want to get all my grading done before next week, so I can go into Research Mode for the summer, which means I need to work fast.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, this is giving me a new appreciation for what my colleagues in the humanities do every term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior\/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as… Continue reading How the Other Half Grades<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,23,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-quantum_optics","category-two_cultures","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}