Grading

I use a straight point system; there are a total of 100 points for the course. Specifically:

I urge you not to think about or worry about grades. Everyone starts the course with an A. If you do the assignments on time—including discussion participation!—then you will do fine. If you find yourself calculating points, just stop. You have only so much time and energy to spend on this class, and that's not a productive way to spend it.

I'll be sending out progress reports twice during the semester. These serve two functions: one, to let you know how you are doing in discussion; two, to list completed assignments and grades, so we can make sure neither you nor I have missed one.

Term Paper

The term paper is vital because here is where you will actually practice the craft of history. Reading history books isn't doing history, it's just reading about it. It's like reading books about chemistry and then claiming you're a chemist. Put another way, I cannot measure what you have learned; I can only measure how well you write history. So you do a term paper.

Requirements

Length

Between 5000 and 7000 words. Not one word less, but also not one word more. A paper that is either longer or shorter will be sent back unread with an F, but you will be allowed to re-submit without penalty. Use your word processor's word count function!

I do not include headers, footers, titles, footnotes, or bibliography in the word count.

Format

I can accept documents in the following formats only. Any other format will be returned and you will be asked to re-submit.

Sources

You must use a minimum of four scholarly books and four journal articles in your research. More is expected; that's just a minimum.

You can use Internet sources, but they will not count toward the minimum. Moreover, if a crucial point of your argument depends on Internet sources alone, without confirmation from a scholarly source, I will challenge you on it.

You can cite the books and essays required in this course, but these will not count toward the minimum. The four books plus four articles are in addition to what I expect you to read for the course.

Scholarly Apparatus

I prefer footnotes over endnotes when I read books, but for student papers I prefer endnotes. I definitely dislike embedded citations like [Jones, 1992] because it disrupts the flow of the prose. The only people who like this format are social scientists, who can't write anyway. If you must use this format, you are required to include the page number.

Beyond that, I don't worry about specific formatting. Every discipline has its own peculiarities and they're generally not important. What does matter is this: that your citation is sufficiently precise to allow the reader to go to the exact point where you got your information. That's the whole point of footnoting; everything after that is merely style.

Similarly for the bibliography. Choose any format you like, but be consistent with your choice. The point of the bibliography is to provide the reader with enough information to lay hands on the exact version of the book or journal that you read. This generally means author, title, year published, and publisher. For journals it would include journal name and issue.

As noted elsewhere, you can use web sites as sources, but they will not count toward your required minimum number of sources.

Mechanics

The first thing I check is the length. If the paper is too short, or too long, then it gets sent back, ungraded. If it's end of semester, you get a D. If it meets the length limit, I check for a bibliography and give it a quick scan. Only then do I start reading.

Thesis

In the text itself, the first thing I look for is a good thesis statement. If it's absent, or poorly developed, this nearly always signals fundamental problems with the paper. A good thesis statement is vital to a good paper. I've never read an A paper that didn't have one. Ever.

Argument

Once I identify the thesis statement, it becomes the standard by which I judge the rest of the paper. The structure of the paper should reflect the principal points by which the thesis is demonstrated. The individual paragraphs become the specific pieces of evidence, and the sentences within each paragraph develop and explain those pieces of evidence.

Style

I normally read papers at least twice. One pass will be to judge the general readability of the paper. Are the sentences well-constructed (goes beyond merely being grammatically correct)? Is the writing persuasive and engaging? Does the paper open and close well, and are the transitions handled gracefully?

Research

In judging the quality and extent of your research, I look at three things: the extent and depth of the bibliography, your use of footnotes, and the extent to which the research represented in your bibliography is actually used in the course of the argument.

Grammar and Spelling

Grammar and spelling do count. They don't count because they are intrinsically important but rather because when there are too many errors, the paper itself suffers. Your goal is to communicate. Spelling and grammatical errors, along with poor syntax, poor word choice, etc., are like noise--they get in the way of successful communication. In speech, if you say "uh" once or twice, it's no big deal. Say it every other word, and you undermine your ability to communicate.

Final Comments

I don't assign separate points to the above; I have broken the grading process into sections simply to make a clearer explanation. What I actually do is read the paper through from start to finish and assign an initial grade. Then I set the paper aside and grade more papers or go do something else. Once I've done all papers, I re-read your paper and see if there's any reason to change my mind about the basic grade. Then I go through it making comments, which also gives me a chance to change my mind one more time.

Late Work

A paper that is turned in late will be graded down one full grade. The lateness doesn't matter; late equals one full grade.

Make-up Work; Extra Credit

There is no make-up work and I don't give extra credit assignments. If you are interested, you can read about why.

Discussion

I look first to see if you are posting at least three messages every week. If you are not, I stop there. The best you can get is a D. You cannot make up a week; this is an on-going discussion and if you weren't there then you weren't there. I measure the week as Monday through Sunday, but if you're keeping score at that level then you're going about this all wrong anyway. You should not be aiming for the minimum!

Assuming you are posting at the minimum, I begin to look at the quality of the discussion. In general, I am looking for evidence that you are learning the material, that you are gaining an understanding of the era. Beyond that I look to see if you are actually participating in the discussion and not merely holding a private conversation. Finally, I look to see how well you say what you have to say.

Understanding

It's not enough to learn something. You must be able to communicate what you are learning to someone else. In a discussion format, this includes asking questions. A good question is one that shows that you have thought about the question and that you have tried to answer it for yourself. A poor question is one where you do not demonstrate this. Worse yet is when the answer is actually in our required reading, for this implies you didn't do the reading. People overlook things, of course, so I expect this to happen from time to time. It's when I see a patter of this over the whole semester that I take it into account when I assign a grade.

If it's a comment instead of a question, I look for the comment to add something to the class. Comments that essentially say "I agree" with what someone else has said are fine; this is a conversation, after all, and not just a series of essays on a common theme. Here again, when a person's participation are made up mostly of the "me too" variety (or it's cousin, the "gosh I didn't know that" comment, or "it's amazing to me that..."), then is when the overall discussion grade may suffer for it.

Discussing

The discussion board is a place for the entire class to discuss the Reformation. It is not simply a delivery mechanism so you can talk directly to me. I could have used email for that. In this class, each of you is always talking to the entire class. For this reason, I expect to see people respond to questions posed by fellow students, to engage in conversation. When I see a pattern where a student logs in once a week, posts three messages unrelated to what others are saying, and then disappearing until next week, that person will not do as well in their discussion grade, regardless of how historically accurate those comments are.

Style

I do look at how well you write. Our discussions are "semi-formal," a term about as slippery as "semi-formal dress." What I mean by it is that I do not fuss over grammar and spelling the way I do in your formal writing assignments. In discussion, conversational English is acceptable. But I still will favor clarity over muddiness, strong rhetoric over weak. If I'm undecided between one grade and another, this can make the difference.

There is one aspect that's clear-cut, however: citing your sources. I absolutely require that you tell us where you found that bit of information. We don't have to get into formal citations, but if you read it in Tracy, then give the page number. If you found it on the Internet, give the URL.

A Rough Rubric

If you don't participate, you get an F for discussion. If you participate but at a rate of less than three messages a week, you cannot get any better than a D.

The C grade can apply to different kinds of scenarios. One is the student who does a reasonably good job with message, but who lands right at that minimum level, maybe was short on two or three weeks, and/or whose messages only rarely interacted with the rest of the class. In other words, all the signs of minimal effort. Another scenario is the student who participated well, but who simply isn't understanding the material very well.

The student who gets an A has participated at a high level in the on-going conversations and who has demonstrated a good understanding of the material. This person has been an asset to his or her fellow students. That's what I'm looking for. In my opinion, you all ought to get an A.

That leaves the B grade, which I give to those who come up short in some way. This might be the person who is obviously a very good historian but who didn't put out much effort. Or the person who tried very hard, but whose level of understanding simply doesn't merit an outstanding grade. I can't justify a C, but neither can I justify an A. So B it. (sorry).

Opening and Closing Essays

These are very short assignments that are different from all your other assignments. Elsewhere I emphasize the importance of research and analysis, but in these two essays I want you to write without doing any research at all. The whole point of the exercise is to have you work from what you know without having to look up anything.

Opening Essay: Whaddyaknow?

In this exercise I want you to write whatever you know about the Reformation specifically and about Europe between 1500 and 1700 gneerally. I am not trying to measure how much you know, and it doesn't matter if what you write turns out to be accurate or not. The purpose of the assignment is for you to establish a benchmark for yourself: what you knew (or thought you knew) coming into this course. The only way to get anything other than full credit for this assignment is not to do it, or to fail to take it seriously.

Closing Essay: What You Have Learned

The companion exercise comes at the very end of the course, after you turn in all your other assignments. Again I want you to write off the top of your head. Your essay should address the most important things you have learned in the course, the most surprising things you learned, and should close with what you would tell someone else about this time period.

All too often at the end of a course you are so buried in details, working on final exams and term papers, and then the semester is over, and you never get a chance to reflect on the course as a whole. The purpose of this assignment is to give you that opportunity. Again, you should expect to get full credit, so long as you make a full effort.

Section Exercises

These are chances for you to do kinds of historical work that isn't covered by the traditional term paper. I give these exercises to give at least some inkling of the range of activities and skills employed by a working historian. I intend them to be serious and worthwhile, but also interesting and (dare I say it) even fun.

The first exercise requires you to wrestle with a primary source, not at the general level of understanding the whole document, but at the detail level of specific words and phrases. In certain areas of historical research, each and every word of a document must sometimes be scrutinized. Moreover, the historian must also be able to explain his or her interpretation of those words to others.

The second exercise has you exploring a different kind of document: the Internet. Historical sites are of course scattered all across Europe. I want you to get some experience in how to conduct extended searches (not merely take the first hit or two on Google). But I also want you to get practice in taking disparate sources and weaving a coherent account from them.

The third exercise has you reading images rather than text. Art historians approach the visual record in one way, but historians read that record looking for different things. As with the other assignments, I'll be judging not only how perceptive you are, but also how well you communicate your perceptions in writing.

In all these exercises, it's not a matter of getting the "right answer." It's a matter of gaining understanding and communicating that understanding in clear language. You should get full credit regardless of what you are able to see, so long as you make an honest effort and are able to write well.