<p>I do not feel my composition exam was graded fairly at all. It seems like the grader read my essay at the speed of light, decided it was all incoherent without even trying to understand my claims, and then gave me Not Satisfactory on basically every single category possible, throwing in some comments that my essay was very pretentious. It's some of the most worthless feedback I've ever received on an essay in my life. Does anyone here have experience in requesting that an exam be regraded?</p>
<p>Besides, I've already taken an upper-level writing-intensive philosophy course at Rice, and I got an A+ on the semester-long research paper. What exactly is the purpose of this composition exam again?</p>
<p>its cool. I was like *** when I saw mine. The composition exam is really dumb. People who can barely talk or speak like Ali-G have managed to pass while my friend (an English major - and a fantastic writer) had to take the class.</p>
<p>Email them and request a re-evaluation. Worst case, they say no</p>
<p>The whole thing is poorly organized, imo. I got stuck with the second session and when I read the instructions, which were bs, and the required readings, which were even more bs, I thought it was too ridiculous so I just sent in a blank essay</p>
<p>the class is about as easy as ESCI 101 (which is rocks for jocks. its like 3rd grade geography). just take it, if nothing else, its a GPA booster</p>
<p>I never got my results back, but apparently I passed, which is ridiculous because I’m a terrible writer. So yeah, it’s probably a bunch of ********.</p>
<p>I’m not looking to be argumentative with anyone who has posted on this thread, but it seems that the information posted just seems so out of line with everything else I’ve heard about Rice.</p>
<p>Can anyone weigh in with a different perspective? Does anyone think that the exam is of some value and is graded fairly? </p>
<p>Or is this really the consensus? Does everyone see it as somewhat of a joke?</p>
<p>bird rock - I can only give you my perspective and that shared by some of my friends.</p>
<p>To us, it was the outlier amongst rice classes. (A few classes like Earth Science 101 are also bad. They are usually taken by the varsity athletes and co). I think they rush the grading on the tests. </p>
<p>I think everyone should either take the class or they need to fix the system. In my case, I felt quite screwed because I was given a ‘Not Satisfactory’ due to my choice of citations despite there being no instructions to the contrary.</p>
<p>The consensus here seems to be that it is a joke. Id be curious to see if someone has a different perspective on this too</p>
<p>It’s hard to provide any counter arguments. People who pass the test generally consider themselves to be good writers. So those who pass are happy and are not going to complain about the writing test. Those who fail (and who are almost certainly pretty darn good writers or they wouldn’t be admitted to Rice), are likely unhappy and consider the test to be arbitrary and unfair. I believe there is a difference between essay writing and correctly cited academic writing and not all good writers can write a good research paper (the object of the test). I can also comment that I saw the instructions for the writing test and the citation requirements seemed quite clear.</p>
<p>I cannot comment on the quality of the remedial writing classes. Hopefully they are good, but the comments above suggest that is not the case. Having said that, if you can write well and your test “failure” occurred because of incorrect citations, then the class would seem very easy. In that case one, or possibly two, class meetings would be sufficient to convey the standards expected.</p>
<p>I’m obviously biased. But I have have written a lot of research papers–in literature, in philosophy, and in mathematics–and the composition exam was in no way a research paper. Being forced to cite pre-selected articles does not make it “research.” If anything, it’s the exact opposite of research–research consists in finding good sources, not in twisting pre-selected sources to fit your purposes, which one must unfortunately do in the composition exam if one’s beliefs are not trivial logical corollaries of the information in the articles.</p>
<p>Yeah the test is pretty unpredictable, I wrote an ok essay and passed, but really from what I hear comm 103 sucks because nobody wants to be there. My roommate took it and from what I saw it was basically like a slightly more difficult high school english class.</p>
But I have have written a lot of research papers–in literature, in philosophy, and in mathematics–and the composition exam was in no way a research paper. Being forced to cite pre-selected articles does not make it “research.” If anything, it’s the exact opposite of research–research consists in finding good sources, not in twisting pre-selected sources to fit your purposes, which one must unfortunately do in the composition exam if one’s beliefs are not trivial logical corollaries of the information in the articles.</p>