<p>I must try your patience again with a longish explanation to ask for help with this quandary:</p>
<p>Two of my D's colleges require a graded school paper to be submitted with the application. We live in Europe so most of D's work has not been in English. Some of her best work was done Junior year during an exchange in the USA, so she wants to submit one of these papers. When she left the US she brought back a box with all graded work. We have just discovered that her favorite English paper does not have the grade written on it--mostly it has check marks and smiley faces next to the parts the teacher liked. It was the term paper for the first quarter. Her quarter grade was 95.The same teacher also wrote a strong reference, which we are sending as one recommendation.</p>
<p>Now, this teacher got pregnant and left for maternity leave in Jan. of that year. My D wrote another paper for the replacement teacher which received an A and that grade is on the paper.</p>
<p>What to do?</p>
<p>The first paper is a contrast /comparison using television and film with a theme close to D's heart. Should we send this with explanation?</p>
<p>The second paper is a competent analysis of Hamlet but not quite as deeply felt or as original as the first paper. Should we send this A paper instead to avoid complicated explanations?</p>
<p>OR D's favored approach is to send both papers, explaining that Paper I is what she wishes to submit but, if it does not meet the formal requirement because the grade is missing, she is also submitting Paper II, which clearly received an A and positive comment.</p>
<p>We would be very grateful for your wise insights and advice.</p>
<p>The grade is in fact less important than the contents of the paper itself. The adreps want to get a sense of the sort of assignments a student was given and what the student did to fulfill the assignment.</p>
<p>I think she could appropriately send her favorite and a cover letter describing just what you posted here (foreign language/favorite English/Graded English)--and then submit the favorite English. It establishes that she reads and follow directions, that she is fluent in two languages (!) and that she wants to show them her best, most representative writing. They really are not looking at the grade per se (schools are not standard enough for this to be meaningful). I think they are looking for fluency, the student's voice--and to having a writing sample that was probably really done by the student (not a professionally edited piece that is...)
It is actually an opportunity to make her sample stand out some from the many they will read.</p>
<p>I concur with the above -- send both, with a short cover note of explanation. Make sure full name, address and SSN are on every page, so they won't get misfiled in the mail room.</p>
<p>Two of D's schools requested "graded" papers. It never occurred to me that they expected a grade per se (numerical or letter) to be on it. I just assumed they meant grading marks and comments. Oh, well. They didn't send it back to us. Yet, anyway. LOL.</p>
<p>Are you saying she never received a grade specifically on this paper or that it just doesn't happen to be written on the paper? If the former, I would follow m&sdad's suggestion. If the latter, I would do that plus note that the grade for the paper was "9x", although it is not actually written on the paper itself.</p>
<p>Pyewacket - please don't take this the wrong way :o. I got such a chuckle reading your post. I thought we were the only people in the world who got ourselves into such convoluted dilemmas! Quandary indeed!</p>
<p>Probably any or all of those solutions are quite reasonable. I would send in both papers with a short note - but again, that's the type of thinking that gets you into the dilemma in the first place!</p>
<p>I agree with the preceding posts; I think the point of asking for "graded" papers is to be sure that applicants submit papers that are not written for application purposes and haven't been doctored to look better than they were to begin with. Hence a paper submitted for a class and with teacher's comments on it should certainly count as a "graded" paper, especially when accompanied by the short notes described above. (It is, indeed, much easier to take a simple approach to these things and assume the best when one no longer is in the midst of the application process; I'm pretty sure we went through the same quandary two years ago and thought it was more complicated then.)</p>