[Leica] Writing (was: writing going downhill etc)

[n.wajsman at chello.nl (n.wajsman@chello.nl)]

In the late 80s I taught economics at a community college in Tampa and a 
liberal arts college in St. Petersburg. Being young and stupid, I bravely 
decided to forgo the traditional multiple choice tests and require the 
students to write short answers to relatively easy questions and make the 
occasional calculation with accompanying explanation. After the first 
semester I had to abandon this and revert to the standard tests. The level 
of writing of my students was such that it was in many cases impossible to 
decipher what they meant--I was trying hard to find some grain of truth in 
each answer so that I could give the person at least partial credit, but 
after spending an inordinate amount of time grading 40 tests in this way and 
calculating what I was earning per hour for this activity, I quickly decided 
that stuffing 40 marked answer sheets into a machine was the only viable way 
to do this.

Nathan
> 
> van: Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
> datum: 2004/06/24 do AM 04:04:48 CEST
> aan: Leica Users Group <lug@leica-users.org>
> onderwerp: [Leica] Writing (was: writing going downhill etc)
> 
> 
> >> we engineers are notorious for bad writing skills.
> >
> > One of the appealing features of the engineering curriculum at my school 
> > was a notable lack of coursework that required writing papers.
> 
> In the 1980s I was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.
> One time I assigned a term paper in an upper-level undergraduate class. I 
> take writing seriously; I believe that the ability to communicate a design 
> is as important as the ability to create it in the first place.
> 
> The students were, in general, outraged. One student filed a formal 
> grievance with the university's ombudsman, claiming that it was unfair to 
> require an engineering student to write a term paper. Although I won the 
> case, I did have to spend a non-zero amount of time defending myself. It 
> didn't hurt that the ombudsman's own field was cultural anthropology.
> 
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