Course Plans and Qualifying Essay

As I write this on August 20, the course plans and assignments are finalized. You can read them by going to Our English Course in the sidebar and clicking Course Content. (Blogger has changed things a bit, so you probably need to click the little three line thing ☰ in the upper left.)

A word about the QE

For a long time, English 100 had a very hard-edged requirement called the “Qualifying Essay” (QE), an in-class essay that you had to pass in order to pass the course. When we ran into Covid-19, a lot of things changed, and one of them was our class schedule. We were mainly meeting by Zoom online connections (that didn’t work too well), and one of the things that just did not fit was the QE requirement.

Over the last few years, a lot has changed in higher education, and one big change is that a very large number of students now use Artificial Intelligence to write their papers. Here at Ashland, it has become too common for my students to submit papers that way—and they often have no clue what they “wrote.” (Obviously, submitting a paper that someone/something else wrote and calling it your own does nothing to move your education forward.)

This brand of cheating is why we are bringing back the QE as an attempt to measure what you have actually learned in the course. It is in our schedule just before the Thanksgiving break. Unfortunately, I cannot give you some of the details about it because the decision to put the QE back into the course came rather late, and changing things such as standards for passing requires a decision by people above my pay grade, so I do not know exactly how things will work, but I promise I will let you know as soon as I am informed. I will probably need to revise the course syllabus to include the new criteria.

In the meantime, the best way for you to prepare for the QE is to learn how to actually write things. Pay attention to the material in our class. Visit the Writing Center. Do not assume that simply walking in and sitting down forty times in the semester is enough to get you through English 100.