By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 30, 2013
As we reach the middle of semester, students are once again slaving over research, primary sources, and lecture notes with a grim intensity. Their goal? Final papers.
After days or weeks of hard work and a brief sojourn on an instructor’s desk, however, the stapled, rumpled pages are often relegated to the closet, the filing cabinet, or the recycling bin. But is that the end of an essay’s life?
The faculty at UFV’s Writing Centre say no.
They recently hosted their fourth-annual Writing Prize Awards, by which 13 students were honoured for work they wrote for class assignments.
Nadeane Trowse, one of the organizers of the awards and an instructor at the Writing Centre, opened the awards ceremony this year.
“It’s a delicate and wonderful process,” she told the room of students, parents and faculty. “Each year the papers are different; each year instructors ask students to write different sorts of papers.”
These awards honour writing from any discipline, and this year ranged from philosophy to math to nursing. Instructors are encouraged to submit their students’ work whenever they see excellence, reminded in UFV-wide emails three times a year.
This year they received over 60 entries representing around 70 students.
Perhaps the most unique feature of the Writing Prize Awards is how they divide and judge the work they receive. There are no set categories from year to year; papers are grouped together according to content, the level of course material, and how much research was decided. From there, organizers choose categories that best suit the way the papers are divided.
“The goal is obviously to have categories that are not comparing apples and oranges but apples with apples,” Shurli Makmillen said, the other organizer.
This year some categories included “Upper Level Analysis of Cultural Texts / Authors / Genres” and “Indigenous Issues (All Levels).”
“It is some matter of stress, strain, and brain activity to make sure the categories work for everybody,” Trowse said with a laugh.
After the categories are finalized and the papers sorted, two volunteer faculty judges evaluate each category, matched to their areas of expertise. Obviously, a chemistry prof would have less to say about an essay on Victorian poetry than an English instructor who has studied in that field.
If the two judges find a clear winner in their category, the winner can be immediately chosen. If they disagree, a third judge is brought in to break the tie. Makmillen says the system works fairly well.
“Over the years, about 75 per cent of categories are agreed upon by the initial pair of judges,” she notes.
And now the two organizers are hoping that the winning students will use the Writing Awards as a jumping-off point, rather than thinking of it as an end accomplishment.
“We are hoping winners and others from the UFV community will consider taking their research one or two steps further,” Makmillen says. “[Either] to UBC’s Arts Undergraduate Humanities and Social Sciences Conference [or] to think about submission to one of the many Canadian and international journals of undergraduate student research.”
