Re: Final Exam Feedback

Believe it or not, I finished grading. Working on inputting scores into my gradebook. Expect to see them posted here shortly.

When the grades are posted here on the course blog, please do not immediately email me for feedback or “what could I have done differently/better.” I have some general comments below for everyone.

Re: grade disputes. I will ONLY entertain grade disputes if you submit to me in writing (via email) why you feel the grade does not reflect what you did. It needs to be clear and demonstrate that you can connect your essay back to the question you chose to answer. As such, you need to reference you own essay. I will not have much time between now and next week to go back-and-forth with you about your score.Once I submit them to MyECC, that's it.

Here is some broad & general feedback regarding the final exam:

Many of you did not fully address the questions. As I mentioned in class, you needed to address each component of the question. Essays that went beyond the questions while still answering the core components were generally better that those that went beyond w/out addressing core components of the questions. I personally never grade people down for their opinion, but I don't give people better scores for writing really good essays that don't actually focus on the prompt.

Make sure on future exams in other courses you provide FACTUAL EVIDENCE about your opinion. For instance, there is a stark difference between saying "I think Trump will make people vote because he would make a bad president" and "I think the rise of Trump will cause more people to vote because Trump's campaign has sparked an interest in many folks who are typically apathetic or disillusioned with the political process--and generating interest is a key reason people choose to vote."

Since so many of you did your essay on voting: you needed to bring in Direct Democracy; many lost points simply for ignoring that. Also, if you neglected to discuss voting cues, implicitly or explicitly, you missed some points.

In general, I was happy with the lack of outside sources (many of you integrated statistics or factual evidence in a meaningful way).

That said, many folks seemed to have forgotten about their lecture notes. The textbook does a fine job of providing you the answers to the questions, but stronger essays did a great job blending the two together. The best essays brought both into a dialog with the “state of the world outside” (perhaps by analyzing the current election or reviewing the types of news coverage on TV vs the Internet).

Not too many “kitchen sink” essays. A KS essay is one that throws everything-but-the-kitchen-sink into their paper without actually doing anything with that info. Some essays actually rec’d higher scores despite not including every little key term, because what they did include was coherent and supported their argument and analysis in a persuasive and compelling manner. “Showing” is good, but you also need to “tell” the reader why you are bringing something into your paper.

Minimum pages means minimum pages. You lost points if your essay was sparse because the directions asked you to write a certain number of pages.

Some tips for writing social science essays:

Avoid speculation without supporting evidence.

Avoid saying something is “natural” (in social science, nothing is natural…the only scholars that are allowed to say this are those who published centuries ago, like Madison).

Avoid giving readers “facts” that are not actually facts but just what YOU think is true (especially if the reader is a professor).

Avoid generalizations (“everyone” “all people” “the isn’t a single person who doesn’t”).

Avoid inserting your opinion until the end of the paper, and do so in a critical fashion (again: see the Trump example up top).

I will update this post as I have more general feedback.

PS -- when calculating your overall grade in the course, I decided to keep my word and keep your top 8 quiz scores.