UCLA Philosophy Worksheet

This assignment helps you build the precursor to a rough draft of your Unit 6 essay by walking you though a series of questions.

Details

I suggest doing this assignment before starting on the essay; though that’s not required.

You will get credit for simply completing this assignment.

This assignment walks you through each of the main tasks of writing the Unit 6 Essay. In the last step, the app will compile your responses into a skeleton of the Unit 6 Essay. If you choose to use the skeleton to write your essay, you will still need to do a lot of work tying it together and fleshing things out. You are not required to use the skeleton draft for your essay.

When scroll to the bottom of this page and click the button which says something like ‘Launch Unit 6 Walkthrough in a new window’, you will be securely logged into an app which opens in a new window (you won’t be in Canvas anymore, Dorothy.)

I created the app. I’ve tested it as best I can. But it is likely to be buggy. If it doesn’t seem to be working right, it’s probably the app, not you. Please stop and let me know before you get frustrated.

If for some reason you can’t complete this assignment because of technical problems, you will receive full credit. Just let me know what the problems were (if possible, let me know when you tried to do it. That will make searching the logs easier).

Justification

I don’t want to add work without providing a justification. Feel free to ignore the following, if you’re not interested.

A few years ago, I created an app that lets me collect a ton of fine grained assessment data on your essays as I grade them. Overall, this semester’s essays have been better than historical averages.

However, when I look only at the essays at the low end, they tend to be lower than historical averages for low end essays. This semester has also seen an alarming rise in plagiarism cases.* This tells me that I’m not doing a good job of helping those who are struggling or disinterested.** I want to fix this.

This problem probably has multiple causes. One likely factor is that I’m not successfully communicating what I’m looking for in essays or how to approach them. The unit videos could definitely be better. But I doubt spending a bunch more time perfecting the videos will help in the short term. There will always be a difference between being told how to something and being actively coached as you do it. You need more of the latter the more you struggle.

The vast majority of my office hours are spent in this sort of active coaching. (Sound good? Stop by!) But since we’re fully asynchronous, office hours aren’t going to reach everyone. I’ve thus talked myself into rolling out a very early version of an app that tries to replicate these office hour conversations by walking you through the essay writing process. Since it’s highly experimental, I’m making it a low stakes credit/no-credit assignment. Hopefully it helps some folks and isn’t too much of an annoyance to everyone else. I plan to do a survey and other assessment to figure out if that was the case before the end of the semester.