Papers and presentations are expected to demonstrate basic communication skills which should have been learned in grammar school, high school, and any prerequisite college courses.  This is to prepare you for the communications that will be expected of you in the professional world.  The guidelines in these sub-pages are here to serve as some basic reminders of communication and research skills.

• Never plagiarize.  This will always result in a "0" and may entail additional academic penalties in accordance with college policies.

• Use only authoritative sources and cite them properly.

• Set up your paper according to standard and specified guidelines.

• Use good grammar, punctuation, etc.

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You should pay careful attention to the assignment rubric so that you will know how your grade is determined.

• In a few cases where an assignment is worth only a tiny portion of your grade and expected to take only a small amount of time, it may be simply graded as pass/fail (or something similar to that).

• In most cases, however, a detailed rubric is provided.  The rubric should serve as a checklist about (1) what to include, and (2) how much emphasis should be given to each part.  In other words, if you see one item worth 2 points and another item worth 6 points, be sure to include both, but give more detail and emphasis to the 6-point item.

• Although I do expect good communication skills and have provided you with these helps, the weight of these items will also be included in the rubric.  In cases where the college requires me to grade communication skills as a major emphasis, this will be reflected in the rubric.  In my own choice of assignments, however, most of the grade will have to do with content and methodology.  Again, see the rubric so you know what to expect.

• Remember, unless I specifically state that a paper is about your opinion or your personal experience, then your opinion or experience has nothing to do with the paper or the grade.  Again, the rubric will show you the exact breakdown of points, and this will almost always be about content and methodology.  Even if a paper is to reflect your opinion or experience, I am not grading the opinion or the experience itself, but how well you have "handled" those topics according to the assignment guidelines.

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Finally, when grading papers and presentations, I will probably make comments for improvement which go beyond the specific guidelines of the rubric.

• Such comments are not meant to be insulting or to imply that your work is inferior.  They are meant to help you do even better work in the future.  Please accept them in that spirit and use them on future assignments.

• If the comments are, in fact, about things not covered in the rubric, then these things are not part of your grade.  Again, the grading goes strictly by the rubric.  Any additional comments are simply intended to help you improve for the future.