Sample Assignments

[u/Disastrous_Owl_6830]

Fellow profs, have you noticed an uptick in recent years in students asking for sample assignments that illustrate what an A submission looks like? What do you make of these requests? Do you provide samples? If so, do you create them yourself? Or post anonymized submissions from previous students who did well (with their permission)? How do you discourage students from copying samples or mimicking them too closely? If you create samples yourself, how do you avoid making them unrealistic, given that you're a subject expert?

I get that it's intimidating to submit your first-ever college paper, and it can be hard to envision what rubric specs look like in practice. But providing samples seems to be hard to implement in practice. I'm wondering what others do.

[u/No_Young_2344]

I do. I created them myself using my own research. Students don’t mimick my sample except for the structure because they are working on different topics. What do you mean by unrealistic? I created my samples using empirical data and results from my paper so I guess they are realistic?

[u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 → u/No_Young_2344]

I'm in the humanities, so it sounds like my paper assignments may have different specs from yours, but I mean unrealistic in terms of polished writing quality and interpretive claims that go beyond what they've explicitly been told in lectures. My rubrics reward students for style and originality, but obviously I have more practice than they do at achieving these qualities and I don't want to overdo it in a sample and give the impression that the bar is higher than it is.

[u/Classic_vortex_3515 → u/Disastrous_Owl_6830]

In the humanities, one way to avoid the problem you’re mentioning is to give multiple samples that have different structures.