Grading Criteria

Grades should be based on a review of the student's portfolio, collected at the midterm point and at the end of the semester. They are required to submit about 25 pages of revised work, not including rough drafts, group work, or peer revision. You are responsible for developing your own grading criteria and presenting it to the students at the beginning of the semester, based on your individual assignment choices. Based on the sample syllabus on the 342 page, here is one version of how the grade could be calculated:

• Feature Story (and preparatory work): 35%
  
  
• Book Review (and preparatory work): 20%
  
  
• Interview Story (and preparatory work): 25%
  
  
• Online Review: 5%
  
  
• News Brief: 5%
  
  
• Group Presentation (and preparatory work): 5%
  
  
• Other discretionary issues (attendance, preparation, engagement with the material): 5%

Grading Policies:

Papers are due in class on the day that they are due. If students turn them in late, they will depreciate in value accordingly. Spelling errors, grammatical glitches, wordiness, blatant discrepancies from the truth, and formatting problems will count against the grade.

You are free to develop your own grading guidelines. The following is a sample method for evaluating work:

A = great story, worthy of publication. Great writing, interesting approach, correct format

B = good story, worthy of publication with editing. Good reporting, but not as interesting as an A, correct format

C = okay story, requires extensive work before publication. Wordy or redundant recounting of the issues, or scant and
superficial treatment of the topic

NP = dull, sloppy, boring, misses the point, poor grammar or organization. Don't even think of publication.

All assignments are required. Missing one means failure. A nonpassing assignment is better than no assignment.

Plagiarism is against the law. We will go over plagiarism in great detail, and I will be checking any suspicious work with our online bloodhound service. Don't do it. Cite any information you use from any source whatsoever, and never use someone's exact words without quotation marks.

Plagiarism:
Rutgers University, The Writing Program, and the Business and Technical Writing Program all offer a wealth of resources to help you communicate the confusing issues surrounding plagiarism to your students. We urge you to review all of this material and present it early and often. We also urge you to use internet search engines available through Rutgers to search for any papers or parts of papers that you suspect are plagiarized.