Physiology - Grading of term papers

55%:    Content

20:    Summary. 

Does it focus on those aspects of the article that were important for the critique?  Did you select the important points to summarize, rather than just copying the abstract?

30:    Critiques

Did you provide critiques that were original, creative, insightful?  Or did you simply rephrase the list of questions that I gave you?  More points for more thoughtful questions, questions that relate to material covered in class.

5:    General

Did you accurately reflect what was in the paper?  Did you provide support for your ideas?  Are there factual errors?  Did you suggest alternative experiments that might be done?

20%:    Readability

Do the ideas flow easily?  How many times do I have to re-read sentences to figure out what they meant?  Does your use of vocabulary indicate that you understood what you had read?  Or does it seem that you simply copied sections of the article?

15%:    Mechanics

10:    Spelling, grammar.  You will lose 1 point for each error in spelling and grammar.  Use a spell-checker and, if necessary, an English-major friend.  You will lose 2 points for not knowing:

the difference between affect and effect
the difference between its and it's
the abbreviated form of et alia
when to use "correlation"
the accepted way of writing the Latin names of species

5:    Proofreading.  You'll lose points if you don't all proofread the paper, which becomes obvious if words are missing in a sentence, or if a student's name is misspelled.

10%:    Conventions

Did you follow directions?  Was the article you found on a topic appropriate for this course?  Was the scientific article you found the one that was referred to in the newspaper article?  Was the bibliography correctly formatted?  Did you give appropriate citations to sources in the text of your paper?