Assessment in the Humanities in university still depends heavily on “the essay”, either as a paper or in an examination. Any survey of syllabii in the humanities and liberal arts will bear this out – the bulk of our marks go for the abilty to write essays of varying length, from 1,500 words up 6,000-8,000 words in later years of the degree. In my own dept, out of 43 courses in the book of modules this coming year, 19 are assessed by essays, and 19 by short essay and essay examination, leaving 5 different courses. This is not uncommon in Ireland and England, although assessments in US universities tend to be more varied.
That is not nescessarily a bad thing – our culture depends on written communication for the transmission of knowledge; indeed, clear sharing of written knoweldge is a key part of forming new insights. And a good essay is certainly a “performance of understanding” inasmuch as it requires knowledge of a body of facts, evaluation of their importance, understanding of how they are related, and the abilty to present all this as an effective synthesis in which the person grading the paper can discern, to quote Joe Lee, “evidence of a mind at work”
The problem is that in a modern university, the essay (or ‘paper’ if you must) is worse than useless as a pedagogic tool. It is perfectly fine as a tool for aseesing how well students have met learning outcomes, because it does tick the boxes of every level of Blooms Taxonomy – although one is a bit suspicious of how explictly academics think about that when setting or grading essays. As a vehicle for developing skills, it is worse than useless.
In it’s classic form, the essay was part of a tutorial system in which students wrote essays every week or fortnight which were discussed with academic tutors who had time to read the students work, consider it, discover in tutorials why it was weak and explain how to improve for the next essay. This might not have always worked in practice, but the staff student ratio was such that it was possible. Now most universities struggle to make an essay based assessment regime work with numbers of students which make it impossible. Essay based assessment works with staff:student ratios of 1:20, or possibly as high as 1:40, but no more. When someone is teaching 80, 150 or 300 students in a semester, things quickly fall apart. Grading becomes perfunctory, and is often delegated to grad students who are almost always committed but inexperienced and often lack the authority to provide firm guidance. Feedback becomes formulaic, and driven by the need to write 3 comments on every essay rather than careful diagnostics. Essays, in my experience, are almost never the basis of tutorial discussion because someone might be hurt if the tutor found fault with their work in front of the other students. ( I’ve worked to roll that back – peer critique of essay drafts is now an integral part of many of my courses)
Just because we don’t have the resources to “do” in essays properly doesn’t mean we should abandon them. Students who cannot write a short essay quickly and professionally will almost never progress to longer pieces of writing. Therefore helping them across this threshold is very important. Part of the problem in many Irish and UK universities is that we assume that students who write 1 or 2 essays in a term will somehow magically master all the skills implicit in research, analysis, planning, drafting and finishing an essay. Academics continue to cling to this belief, even though we know many of the essays we see are started 3 days before the deadline.
In my teaching, I try to address this issue by breaking out the steps implicit in writing essays into explicit tasks, which form a portfolio that is directed towards the essay. The list has evolved over the years, and may vary slightly, but now usually includes
- Locate sources
- Evaluate Sources for reliability
- Summarise main points of several readings
- Mindmap of at least 1 source to expose structure
- “Lit Review” to discover the scope of the debate (student often confuse this and evaluation of sources)
- Prepare 3 plans for 1 essay (Most can do two different plans easily enough, but coming up with a third is hard.)
- Write a draft
- Critique drafts of essays by 2 other students
- Finish the essay
Many of these are one page tasks, and most are shared on Blackboard. There are roughly 9, so it fits in a 12 week term. As they appear on Blackboard, I use them to kick off discussion in class – I start many classes by logging into Blackboard and opening up the discussion threads to pull up postings which are good, interesting, or disagree with each other. I usually try to end by posting the discussion starter for next session live at the end of class, or opening the thread for the next task. Of course, this does require a bit of thinking to work out how to flow from class discussion to online work in the LMS and back to class, and it isn’t always smooth or pretty, but life isn’t either, and the process of research and analysis of complex historical issues isn’t always smooth, so we need to learn to live with bumps.
I don’t ‘grade’ all the steps during the course; I do draw attention to the good ones as examples, I do often say “This is good but you missed X” or compare different summaries or mind maps of the same reading to show how easy it is for different people to get different things out of a source. If something is really bad, I’ll deal with it privately with the student. However, I don’t feel obliged to micromanage the process, Â and I try to make that clear. Most LMS allow for peer rating of forum posts – I enable this, and invite people to star posts they particularly like, but this hasn’t taken off.
At the end, along with the essay (or essays if it is a survey course) the students submit a portfolio of the work. I give them some flexibility in this – everyone must participate in online discussions each week, but they can pick their best 5-8 postings for the portfolio; everyone must submit at least one mindmap, but they can put in up to three. This allows them to play to what they feel are their strengths, and forces them to make a judgment about what constitutes their better work, while maintaining a common base that everyone must complete. They are allowed to revise work they have previously shared on Blackboard before submitting it in the portfolio, although very few do that. The specification is so many words of essay, and at least X pages of portfolio, and up to Y pages. The range depends on the credit weight of the course – so for a 5 ECTS course the total assessed is equivalent to 5,000-6,000 words, which is what a conventional course would require (usually, in our dept, a 1,500 and a 4,000 word essay); and the workload for that should be about 100 hours, which is roughly 8 hours a week over the term. I always stress this to the students, so they understnad that I’m not asking them to do more work, just different work. I also give them as detailed a description of the requirements as possible right on day 1, and keep coming back to it on the LMS – I know colleagues who don’t like to hand out essay titles until late in term because they are afraid the students will stop coming to class. I, obviously, have a different view on that point.
It does tend to channel the choice of essays towards topics we cover early in the course, so I am increasing moving towards a cyclic course structure, covering fewer big topics and revisiting them several times as the research process develops. This is where the “teaching for understanding” approach, stressing generative topics and throughlines, is useful.
Does it work? The honest answer I don’t know yet, because I’ve been evolving towards it over several years and it has only reached final form now. This coming year is the first time I’ll be able to use it in what I currently regard as its mature form in at least 2 courses. I hope it will produce better essays in my own courses, but I suspect the real benefit for students will be if and when they apply these practices in later work. My thinking about it continues to develop, as does the delivery, and since every class is slightly different, teaching based on student centred discussion will always have to be flexible.
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