Professors' Guide(TM) to Getting Good Grades in College

Dr. Lynn F. Jacobs, Jeremy S. Hyman

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061750489
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

The Professors' Guide to Getting Good Grades in College is the first book to reveal the insider secrets about how professors really grade. The book offers high-value, practical tips about how to succeed at each of the five "grade-bearing" moments of the semester: (1) The Start (2) The Class (3) The Exam (4) The Paper and (5) The Last Month of the Semester. Fast-paced, entertaining, and easy-to-follow, the Professors' Guide will help you get truly excellent grades in college.

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PART 4

THE PAPER

Chapter 10

Understanding the Assignment

Chapter 11

Doing the Analysis, Doing the Research

Chapter 12

Do’s and Don’t’s for Going to See the Professor

Chapter 13

Top 10 Tips for Constructing the Perfect Paper

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CHAPTER TEN

Understanding the Assignment

The college paper is a kind unto itself. Unlike other kinds of writing you might be more familiar with—the report or summary, the journal entry or newspaper article—the college paper comes with its own set of rules and expectations. That aren’t always told you—by the professor or even by the TA. Luckily for you, we college professors have to churn out academic papers all the time. It’s how we spend our time (a whopping 60 percent) when we’re not teaching. And we’re happy to disclose to you our four-step plan for writing an excellent paper: (1) understand the assignment, (2) do the analysis or research, (3) go to see the professor (or TA), and (4) write that perfect paper. Didn’t quite get all that? Read this—and the next three—chapters, in which (you’ll be happy to hear) we trace these steps, one in each chapter.

When it’s a test that’s being announced, students often feel a sense of great urgency. When will the test be? What will be on the test? How should I prepare for the test? So too with papers. Only this time, the urgency is to delay. Why not put off addressing this unpleasant task till sometime far off in the future? Like a couple of nights before the due date. Come to think of it, the night before wouldn’t be all that bad either.

Surprisingly enough, this usually turns out to be not such an excellent strategy. That’s because top-notch college papers aren’t the sort of thing you can just throw together at the last minute. Successful papers are almost always the result of a process that takes place over an extended period of time. A process in which you think through—and rethink through—some issue. A process in which your mind continues to work on the problem or question even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. This process needs time to develop and gel. There’s a big difference between papers that have been developed over a week or two—with the ideas better thought out, more convincingly argued, and better written; and papers written the night before, which almost always have a coarse, rough-and-ready look. Professors are fully trained to recognize this difference in “look” between these two types of papers. And to capture that difference in the grade they mete out to each.

TASK #1: Get to Know Your Assignment

The first thing to do is to read through your assignment as soon as you get it.

No, we’re not saying that you need to start reading the topic(s) as you are walking out of the lecture room. (There are limits even in the Professors’ Guide. And we wouldn’t want you to knock over any of your compatriots, which wouldn’t help your grade anyway.) What you need to do—either that night (if you’re a night owl) or the next day (if you’re a morning person)—is to plunk yourself down and read the assignment. Not in a rush, not skimming, but with some care and precision. As if you were really going to do the assignment. Which you are. Survey the landscape. Begin to see what you are being asked about (attending to any choice there might be), and begin to forge some plan (however preliminary) about how you are going to do that task. Note down whatever first thoughts or impressions you have. While your first word may not be the last, often these nascent and spontaneous ideas can form the core of what you’re later going to argue.

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Professors’ Perspective

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Most professors actually give considerable thought about when to assign a paper. They take into account not only where the assignment “sits” in the course, but also how much time students should spend working on that assignment. They try not to hand out the paper too early, at a time when no student in his or her right mind would bother to begin, or too late, when there really isn’t enough time left to do a decent job. Take the time of the assignment of the paper as a silent clue from the professor as to when to start working. To begin the process that will culminate in the perfect paper.

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If you’re lucky (and it’s amazing how often students are lucky in this way), acquainting yourself with the paper topic(s) can have an immediate payoff. Lynn, in her Medieval Art course, assigns a paper that asks students to work on the ninth-century Book of Kells. By a fortuitous coincidence (actually, by Lynn’s careful plan), she hands out the paper assignment just two days before the class covering—who would’ve guessed—the Book of Kells! Now, if you had delayed reading the paper assignment (or worse yet, missed the next class), you might not have located the points in the lecture that bore directly on the question assigned. Those little “asides” that shed additional light on “points you might consider in constructing your paper” would have flown by you with barely a notice. All because you hadn’t taken the time to preacquaint yourself with the work you were going to have to do in the paper. (Which, by the way, the more “with-it” students had done as a matter of course.)

Look over the paper assignment (and the various choices of topics, if there are more than one) as soon as you get it. So that you not only get the wheels and springs of your mind going (always a good thing), but also gather relevant information and strategies from the lectures—and also readings, sections, and office meetings—that can follow immediately after you receive the topic(s).

TASK #2: Figure Out the Question(s) Being Asked

Students often come to college thinking they’ll be able to choose their own paper topics. Or that they’ll be assigned very general assignments such as “Write a paper on Pakistan.” It doesn’t usually go that way. Most often, students are given very specific questions to work on—often with subquestions to be discussed and/or subtasks to be done. (And even when professors allow—or require—students to pick their own topics, the professor has a pretty good idea of what would be a good question to ask—and what would be a good answer to give—in that sort of course.)

The result, of course, is that it is most important that you figure out exactly what the professor is asking. Not “more or less (but probably less)” or “I sorta understand (but not really)” or “I have a pretty good idea about the question (but I’m a little fuzzy on the details).” No, what you need is a really precise understanding of what each question (and each part of the question) is asking.

Actively determine the specific question (or questions) being asked. Distinguish it from related but different questions, and also from questions on a different level of generality—either broader or more narrowly focused questions. And actively determine the exact tasks you’re being asked to do in answering those questions. Pay special attention to any verbs in the question: compare and contrast is different from (merely) contrast; evaluate is different from explain; state is different from argue; sum up is different from analyze; raise objections is different from develop illustrations; and so on. Professors spend hours (well, at least minutes) in precisely forming these questions. Spend at least a few minutes understanding exactly what your professor is trying to ask.

IT HAPPENED ONCE…

In a recent paper assignment, Lynn asked students to “characterize the style of the 17th-century sculptor Bernini’s David.” Not being fully sure that to “characterize” meant to “describe the qualities or peculiarities of” (American Heritage Dictionary, p. 226), some students simply named or labeled the style. This basically sent those papers on a downward cascade (into C land) that could easily have been avoided had the students simply had a firm grasp of what “characterize” meant.

Another thing to consider is whether there is one task or multiple tasks. And if there are multiple tasks, are they truly distinct (and of equal value), or is one the main or primary task, and the others only secondary or subordinated to the first? Depending on how you see the question, you’ll think about it—and write about it—in different ways. Also important to consider is the relative weighting of the tasks. Does the professor intend that you spend equal mental space—and equal writing space—on each of the topics? Or is one task supposed to take up less thinking—and less writing—than the rest? All of these questions are important to think through from the get-go, not only because your preparation will be influenced by how you take the question, but also because in many cases the percentages of the grade will be allotted based on how the professor intended the question.

In short, mine the question. Milk it for all it’s worth. Search out any clue—even a mere shade of meaning or choice of words—that might shed some light on what exactly the professor expects you to do.

But now the most important tip of all: If at any time when you’re puzzling out the question(s) you’re not 100 percent—or at least 99 and 44/100 percent—sure of what you’re supposed to do, go see the professor (or TA). Do not keep working. It won’t end well.

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Jeremy Remembers When…

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I was taking a second-year Ancient Greek class, which focused almost exclusively on translating sections of Homer’s The Iliad. Midway through the semester, the professor sprung a paper on us: “Write a 10-page paper on anything you want.” Thinking that most of the class time had been spent on grammar, I decided to write a paper on uses of the particle “since” in The Iliad. Turned out the professor wanted a literary analysis of some theme, character, or plot device in The Iliad. I got a B- on the paper—which really ticked me off, since I could have gotten an A had I only known what to do. Or thought to ask.

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IN OUR HUMBLE OPINION…

Ever wish the professor gave you free rein to pick your own topic? To work on something that you were really interested in or really mattered to you. Well, stop wishing lest you get what you wished for. Having to choose what to write on is a particularly dangerous situation—one fraught with risk and the possibility of getting a bad grade. Pick a bad topic, pick a topic that isn’t appropriate to the field, pick a topic that’s impossible to do, and you’re doomed right from the start.

We think it’s unbelievably hard for students who have little or no familiarity with a field to pick a suitable topic to write on. (Graduate students, and indeed professors, often pick bad topics in their own research and spend large amounts of time chasing down what turn out to be dead ends.) So if you’re given a choice between doing an assigned topic (that is, a designed-to-work topic) and one you have to make up (in other words, a roll-the-dice topic), by all means choose the assigned topic. And even if the professor asks you to pick the topic, you should still have the p...