I’m startin’ small. Just trying to get my daughter to let me read hers. Her two faculty advisors say she should publish it. Based on her grade, it must be halfway decent. We paid $175,000 so she could write it, but darn if we can get her to e-mail us a copy!

My wife and I have resorted to breathless e-mail exchanges, copied to my daughter, with things like, “Look what I found on EphBlog…a link where you can actually download and read a senior thesis!”

Sheesh, a lot to catch up on!

I’d just like to add that ‘risk-taking’ is a valuable part of developing talent and creative thinking..and often not recognized or appreciated by a larger, more public audience. Hopefully a good professor can spot it and encourage it.

However, if a student agrees, and wants, to be published, that would be different…even helpful at a certain stage.

And I hate to tell you, but there is almost nothing in the world that would motivate most students to start their work earlier. And starting work earlier doesn’t improve things for everyone. The earlier I started a paper, the more likely I was to scrap the entire thing and start fresh. The final version was still written in some kind of rush, and no, not always (or even usually) improved by those prior aborted attempts. I think everyone should try to turn in a third draft of a paper…or I suppose more. But if it’s more than a first, I would consider it a victory. Some of us are procrastinators who work well under pressure, others plan ahead and do bits and pieces – it’s the intellectual equivalent of a sprinter versus a marathon runner. Yes, there is a crucial point where you just don’t have enough time, but I would question that 24 hours isn’t enough…especially if you stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew and work the whole 24 ;)

I would also like to point out that for way way way more than the last 5 years, student theses were “published” in some form and a part of the Williams library collection. Now I believe there is/was some student choice in the matter, but my friends who wrote theses (more than 5 years ago) certainly went through that process. I believe it is also how notable alums have had pieces of what I thought were their senior theses included in various displays (I seem to recall a Sondheim exhibit in the Library at some point). No, they weren’t online but neither was anything else. Thesis presentations were also public more than 5 years ago in many departments, even if they weren’t advertised in a manner that can now be found with a google search.

Sounds like a better option is to combat grade inflation–allowing, then, for students to have an incentive they find important (grades) be linked to effort. Positive incentives are generally more palatable than negative incentices. publicizing papers not only is a negative incentive (I don’t want to look bad!) but has another other flaw: it subtly pushes students to take less risks intellectually. That bizarre idea that popped into your head you want to explore? Don’t do it, you might look stupid online!

God knows, as a graduate student I put a lot more effort into my papers now than I did as an undergraduate. I still wouldn’t want 90% of them to ever go public!

Should every student be required to have one major project that is presented publicly? Perhaps–that’s certainly a much more reasonable method than others.

As JG pointed out, students already ARE publicly a part of the intellectual community via blackboard posts, listserves, class discussions, peer editing, etc. Should that be bolstered? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know because those of us not currently at Williams, aren’t part of that specific intellectual community. That’s fine.

2) Another example will be the papers for my course. (Perhaps this will be the first Winter Study course (any course?) to require papers to be made public. Don’t like it? No worries! Don’t take the course. It is a free country.

3) How far to go in the direction of publicness is a difficult question. Many of the objections above are plausible.

4) JG claims:

Publishing only improves the quality of work if students weren’t doing their best already, a proposition I find unlikely.

Ha! Now there is some chance that I interact with a much less academically serious cross-section of the student population than JG, but my understanding is that there is a great deal of “slacking” on student papers at Williams. I find it absurd to think that every student on every paper is already “doing their best.”

Would anyone disagree with the claim that at least 10% (if not 25%) of the papers turned in at Williams do not represent the “best” work that students are capable of? Simple test: If you don’t start the paper at least 24 hours before it is due, it is unlikely to represent your “best” work.

My purpose is not to attack the choices that Williams students make. Many students claim (correctly!) that there is no point in doing their “best” on papers since the grade distribution at Williams is so truncated that even not-so-great work gets an A. True or false? Oren Cass ‘05 had a comment, which I can’t find, along the lines of “Students pretend to work hard on their papers at Williams and professors pretend to grade them.”

I am merely making the empirical claim that, if Joe Cruz were teaching two sections of PHIL 101, the average paper quality would be much better in the section with public postings, even if “public” were defined here to mean just the other members of the class.

You might argue that the costs of such a policy are not worth the benefits, but would anyone disagree on the claim that essay quality would improve?

Are your tutorial papers better or worse than your papers for other classes, classes in which only your professor reads your work?

But the central principal is obvious: Being a part of an academic community requires public participation in the scholarly conversation. Making papers public will increase the quality of work done at Williams. Making the comments (but not the grades) public will have a similar effect. All the good reasons for making senior theses public apply in the context of other classes as well.

Public participation in the scholarly conversation is not the same as posting papers publicly so that you (or someone else) can selectively pull quotes and make fun of them on Ephblog (or someone can do that in the Record or elsewhere). Bad idea.

Students participate in the intellectual conversation via class discussions. But those same students have wildly varying writing skills and having the work published would be an enormous disincentive for those students who took writing classes to improve their writing. Don’t even get me started on making the comments public. If your goal was 100% transparency (as you seem to think it is) then every Blackboard-based discussion should be public and every class discussion should be webcast. I guess we should also add science labs and math exams…stats and econ problem sets? If not, we are privileging certain subjects and certain skill sets.

A senior thesis (which you know will be publicly discussed and critiqued) being published simply expands an already known public audience. Publishing an English 101 (or Religion 101 or Philosophy 101) paper designed for the consumption of your professor who will then give you constructive feedback to improve your writing and anaylsis is entirely different. I flat out would not have chosen my major if this had been the case. I also probably would have dropped Philo 101 after the abysmal grade on my first paper in total humiliation. I was drawn to those classes because they were hard, and I struggled to figure things out. My writing was – I am certain – TERRIBLE. Hell, even my senior seminar paper was probably pretty self-indulgent. But public criticism was part of why I didn’t write a thesis. My intellectual journey wasn’t about public humiliation or public praise.

So I respectfully (or at least I tried to be) disagree that the quality of education would improve if papers were published. I think it would discourage students from taking classes in unfamiliar areas. Frankly, even at the level of improving the particularly pieces that students actually were stilling to write, I don’t know that they would get any better. As an undergrad, I thought I was putting my best work forward already (and I think a lot of Williams students would feel the same way). I was often quite surprised by the comments and suggestions on my writing, even when the grades were very good. So how would knowing it was going to be published change that? Publishing only improves the quality of work if students weren’t doing their best already, a proposition I find unlikely.

Schapiro brought up a hypothetical proposal to compare students’ incoming SAT scores with outgoing GRE scores to determine whether they improved (and presumably correlate those scores to majors and other factors during the college experience).

Morty can’t seriously believe that a college student’s race/ethnicity or family income is likely to change enough during four years of college to significantly impact standardized test scores.

Bad, bad thing to do to freshmen who are adjusting to enough as it is.

Publishing their work puts emphasis on the wrong objectives, for students and for professors. You might get ‘better’ papers in the cookie-cutter sense, but you jeopardize the opportunity to discover, and develop, the more ‘unique’ aspects of their voices.

On the other hand, speaking of SATs, Smith and Wake Forest have decided to do away with SAT requirements starting in 09. Now, that, to me, is an interesting turn of events!

You can read about it here.

Capstone papers for juniors and seniors I can understand being made public (and support). Perhaps if the papers were public but anonymous–but where’s the point in that?