As I mentioned last week in class, I am eager to receive any and all student feedback on the writing assignment I gave you for the first part of the semester. I trust no one found it too burdensome (though you should tell me if you did), and I am especially hopeful some will report in the comments if they found the assignment fun or at least useful/educational.
As always, feel free to post comments with or without your name as you see fit. (And please realize that I will take a lack of comments as a sign that there was not a strong disaffinity for this kind of assignment and that another similar small writing project before Thanksgiving would be just fine.)
Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law 
9 responses to “Seeking mid-break thoughts about mid-term paper assignment”
Fun? I am not sure I would go that far. However, I did find the assignment to be educational, because it allowed me to further investigate some of the data presented in class and use some persuasive language to present it myself. Although it lacked structure, which can be challenging and somewhat frustrating for someone with a technical, structured background like mine (chemical engineering), I chalked it up to this semester’s class theme of thinking outside the box and stepping out of my comfort zone. Finally, I do not think that the deadline for the first assignment was burdensome because of the amount of time between the deadline and when you first introduced it (even for someone with a 17-month old child like me).
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Thanks, Crystal, for these VERY helpful comments. FWIW, I am thinking about providing a lot more structure for short paper #2…
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I would be very much in favor of having the paper be due after fall break. I may be the outlier on this one, but I would have loved to have had fall break to (and I am not kidding, I say this in all seriousness) meditate on the paper and kick more ideas around in my mind. During the extra free time I had over fall break I found a couple of things on my topic I wish I could have added in my paper. Did I find them because I was finally looking in the right place? Or did the leisure of fall break let my mind wander? I don’t know. Just putting the suggestion forward.
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I prefer more specific requirements, but understand your intent and reasoning behind the open-ended nature of the assignment. However, it might help to supply a list of possible topics or areas to consider at the beginning. I for one have never spent any time on sentencing issues before this class and would have liked some additional ideas beyond the death penalty to consider writing about.
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It was OK. I’m the opposite of Olivia in that over break I like to do nothing law school related, and I would do a terrible job if the next paper was due after Thanksgiving.
More structure might be helpful for the next paper, but I didn’t mind the openness of this one. I have no idea how well I did because there were few criteria, but that’s OK.
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I was okay with the due date before break. The open-endedness had pros and cons…I liked being able to research an area that interested me, but I had some trouble focusing on one topic, and I felt like I was revising and re-writing my paper quite a bit. However, I also think learning to write with less structure than usual is a useful skill, so this assignment was good practice.
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I enjoyed the open-ended nature of the assignment. In addition to allowing us to explore an area of interest to us, I felt the assignment provided valuable real-world experience. I anticipate that legal work in the real world will involve clients or partners coming to us with very broad guidelines for an assignment. I agree that the lack of grading criteria makes it difficult to know how we did on the paper, but I believe that we will also receive little feedback in practice. Overall, I was in favor of the assignment’s structure. While open-ended assignments can be challenging, I feel the experience is a valuable one.
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While I enjoyed being able to pick the topic of my choice and investigate it further, like many others have already stated, a more structured guideline would have been helpful. This way, everyone is on the same page as to what is expected and how you will be grading the final papers. At least for me, I know I ran into the problem that because I researched the topic so much, I ran out of room to write all I had to say. In this regards, if there were more specific guidelines I might be more inclined to narrow my focus more so as to avoid this issue.
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Does the open-endedness of the first assignment relate at all to our study of Booker about advisory versus mandatory sentencing guidelines? I personally think that a highly structured assignment helps in making it easier to focus on the topic. On the other hand, having an open-ended assignment while making it harder to pick a topic it did make the assignment more interesting in that it allows us to consider topics we may not at all encounter in any other classes in law school.
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