Pedagogical Note
I finished the last of the lab report grading (for the moment, anyway-- there'll be another lab in a week or two) today, and went looking for diversion in the blogosphere. And what do I find, but PZ Myers holding forth on electronic paper submission in response to a list of rules posted by a Dr. Pretorius.
Now, all of the labs that I just finished grading were submitted electronically, so I'm all in favor of that practice. In fact, I'll go Prof. Myers one better-- I mark them up electronically as well, and email the files back to the students. There are any number of reasons for this, from the environmental (less paper wasted) to the practical (infinite space for comments-- I don't have to struggle to make my remarks fit legibly between lines or in the margins), to the typographical (I no longer have to read single-spaced papers in ugly fonts). I'm generally very happy with the system, and the student response has been fairly positive in the five classes where I've required electronic submission.
I disagree with him about Word, though. Not entirely-- like all Microsoft products, it's needlessly bloated, and whoever came up with the default settings ought to be flogged on national television. When I want to write professional-quality work, I'll use LaTeX, every time. But when it comes to student reports, I'm happy to take them in Word (indeed, I prefer it to most of the other options).
For one thing, the "Track Changes" feature in Word gives me an easy way to do the mark-up on the reports. I could mark them up in a text editor, by setting my comments off with asterisks or something, but it's easier to just type, and have my remarks show up in a different color.
Another nice feature is that it gets them into the habit of thinking of the entire report as one document. I can require them to paste the figures and tables and so on into the same file as the text, and make some start at integrating the two. It doesn't quite free me from dealing with bad handwriting, as a distressing number of students think that the easiest way to get electronic figures is to draw sketches by hand, scan them in at 600 dpi, and paste the resulting JPEG into the file, but it helps. And this is a skill that they will eventually need-- they may not end up using Word, but whatever profession they go into will expect them to be able to make presentable electronic documents. They might as well start in my class.
Finally, I disagree about the role of formatting. For one thing, I don't think that students really do spend a substantial amount of time "fuss[ing] over fonts or paragraph formats or borders or margins." Or, rather, I don't think that eliminating that time will lead to an improvement in quality. It's not like they're budgeting a fixed amount of time to do the paper, and wasting some of it on fussing with the margins-- time not spent twiddling the formatting will be spent drinking or playing video games, not re-thinking and editing the papers.
(How do I know this? I'm young enough to have written every one of my college papers in Word. The only time I spent any significant effort on fiddling around with fonts or margins or borders was when I had a strict page limit, because it was easier to do that than to edit the text. And less editing time meant more time for booze or Tecmo Bowl...)
And formatting is not trivial, at least for the labs I have to deal with. There are a fair number of equations that need to be put into even freshman physics reports, and those are a lot easier to read if you can do subscripts and superscripts and Greek letters. (Which is not to say that I don't have students who ignore those tools, but at least some of them set the equations up correctly, which reduces the pain.)
Anyway, for those of my readers who have to grade written work, I definitely recommend electronic submission and grading. It's worth it just for the ability to type vicious criticisms in ("For the love of God, pick a verb tense and stick with it!") and not have to worry about turning them into constructive criticism in the limited margin space available. A deep breath, and a few strokes of the backspace key, and the scathing remark replaced with supportive, helpful writing advice. And everybody gets to be happy.
Posted at 7:26 PM | link | follow-ups |