Pet Peeve with Writing Assignments #1

My students HATE strict guidelines for their written reports . . . well, some of them do anyway. They wonder why I impose them. Three of the main reasons for my strict guidelines are (1) uniformity of grading, (2) encouraging correct analyses, and (3) teaching the students how to write like businesspeople for businesspeople. Read through my rationales and let me know whether you buy them.

The strict guidelines help take some of the subjectivity out of my grading. If everyone turns in the same type of paper, consistency of grading is easier. If you were a student who submitted the paper without an element (for instance, an executive summary), and got a lower score for not including it--but that element was not in the guidelines for the assignment--would you consider the grading fair? With strict guidelines, I hope I can clearly convey expectations and thereby help students understand what they need to do to get favorable scores.

Second, some of my guidelines encourage my students to write (and thus think) systematically about their topic. To a degree, there are “best practices” for conducting the strategy analyses I assign to students in my business strategy classes, and I use strict guidelines for the write-ups on those analyses as a way to encourage students to do the analyses the right way. By dictating how ideas in my students’ papers are to be written up, I push students to organize their thoughts, not just their papers.

A third reason for the strict guidelines is that I’m training students to write reports in a way that businesspeople will like. There are certain formats that business audiences for written reports are familiar with, and it often helps students/graduates to learn and work within those formats when composing reports.

Now that I’ve given the reasons for my strict guidelines, I have to confess that I often wonder whether my approach is flawed. In fact, my approach has a couple of risks that I’m aware of (and probably numerous risks I’m not seeing).

Strict guidelines can stifle worthwhile innovation. Why would a student try another approach to writing a paper if it ran counter to my guidelines? If you were the student with a creative idea for fulfilling my assignment, you could do the extra work of clearing your idea with me before submitting your paper, but it’s easier to simply conform. Consequently, I don’t see much variety, and I miss out on opportunities to see potentially useful originality. Still, I’m COMFORTABLE taking this risk. Most of the papers I’ve collected that differ from my guidelines do NOT reflect creative genius.

Another concern is that, given the way I’ve compiled them, my guidelines could be a disorganized hodgepodge. Many of the guidelines were added to the list as a result of shortcomings I’ve seen in papers from prior quarters. Particularly when I see the same mistake in more than one student’s papers, I’m inclined to made additions to my list of guidelines in order to avoid seeing those deficiencies again. There’s a risk that the list of requirements will start to lack organization. Just like any writer, I need to ensure that there’s a logical organization to my guidelines to promote their readability and usability (I admit I haven’t done that in awhile). Similarly, there’s a risk of the list becoming too long and onerous (I’ve never really analyzed that).

What do you think? Do you buy my rationales for having strict instructions? Are there other important rationales? What do you think the downsides to strict guidelines are?