🎬 16. The Final Cut

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 16: The Final Cut, which should be completed between 5/10 - 5/15. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 15, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Finalize Qualitative Research Project through global and local revision as well as proofreading tasks

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Important!

Make sure to review the General Feedback page as you make your final revisions this week!

Wrapping Up the Project

This week, you’ll be finalizing your qualitative research paper, first by revising your Discussion and Conclusion sections, then by using the General Feedback to review the entire project and make any necessary revisions before your final submission. Consequently, this module is short and simple, largely designed to highlight issues relevant to the Discussion and Conclusion sections and point out takeaways from the whole class.

Final Draft Expectations

As the assignment guidelines suggest, your final formatted qualitative research project draft must account for all of the items in the General Feedback, items that came up during weekly Q&A (check your weekly notes!), and any items that might have been independely listed in feedback on Classes only. Your final draft should also be free of grammatical errors and should have an appropriately formatted Works Cited page.

Discussion and Conclusion Tips

The most common problem encountered by writers who haven’t worked with primary research data before is understanding the purpose of primary research. Whereas secondary research — using sources to support, complicate, and advance a set of research hypotheses — primary research asks you to do the work of interpreting data you collected and explaining your interpretations to the reader.

Thus, you should make sure to interpret the connotations in specific words and phrases in your interview data. In other words, consider the social, emotional, professional, and cultural associations carried by your interviewees’ words, beyond their literal meaning. After all, out of all the possible means of expressing themselves, your interviewee chose those words for a reason; your task is to explain to the reader what their specific wording might indicate about their professional attitudes and disposition towards the question they’re responding to.

The Conclusion section should avoid restating your findings, as this undercuts all the work you’ve done so far. Instead, your Conclusion should be a place for synthesizing your secondary and primary sources to extend your findings even further and highlight important takeaways for readers, in addition to identifying potential avenues of inquiry that exceeded the scope of your paper.

Search for What You Need!

Remember, if you’re looking for specific information, both this website and our Discord server are searchable through search bars and/or ctrl-F!

As you begin working towards your final formatted semester-long qualitative research project, you might also want to refer to this website’s appendix of model work in specific disciplines. You might also want to try the reverse outlining strategy Abrams’ describes in Concepts and Strategies for Revision. Comparing your reverse outline to the assignment guidelines might highlight areas where you have yet to fulfill the requirements. And if you haven’t already had a chance, you might find the annotated model paper helpful as well!

🛑 Stop: Write!

As part of your final process reflection, pretend that you’re addressing students in your major who might take this class in the future, and write a 1-2 paragraph letter of advice to them. You might tell them what you wish you had done differently in this class; offer strategies for part of the assignment you found particularly difficult; explain an “ah ha!” moment you had that would have made things easier if you’d only had it earlier; or describe the research and writing practice that worked best for you. Think of this as a way of communicating extra context about your writing practice to me.

A Note about Final Course Grades

The alt-grading policy was provided on this website at the beginning of the semester, but here are some reminders and explanations:

• Your final course grade is holistic and cumulative and includes your weekly participation, timely completion of assignments, participation in peer review, communication with me, implementation of general feedback across drafts, visits to writing support services, and other evidence of engagement in the course
• Late Q&A posts were not accepted
• Q&A posts that had little to do with the week’s modules or the qualitative research project were not accepted
• Late peer review posts were not accepted (but you weren’t responsible for reviewing work that your peers submitted late)
• X scores were given for work that was not submitted at all, was submitted after the 1-week grace period for late work, and/or egregiously didn’t attempt to fulfill the assignment guidelines, i.e. failed to demonstrate the assignment objectives, didn’t reflect course content in the modules, and/or didn’t account for feedback
• There is no extra credit in this course
• I grade as leniently as your record of engagement in the course and demonstration of course material permit me to
• I can’t provide extensions on the final draft at this point in the semester, except under documented extenuating circumstances
• Late final drafts will not be accepted

I will post your final draft scores and final course grades to Classes within 48 hours of their submission and will submit grades to the registrar 24 hours after that. As always, please be accountable for the work you did and didn’t do in the course. If you want to discuss your final course grade, we can schedule a meeting for the beginning of next semester.

Course Evaluations

Course evaluations are live and should be completed before the end of the semester. I take these seriously when they are completed seriously (evaluations that demonstrate grade-related bias without accounting for your own decisions in the class tend to be discredited before I even see them), and I implement thoughtful feedback from previous semesters into each new iteration of the course.

Because instructional decisions are often opaque to students, who may not know the institutional pressures or expectations that dictate these decisions, I like to be transparent about what I was and wasn’t able to do for you this semester. Sometimes students critique things outside of my control or leave comments that suggest they don’t understand how certain choices were made with their learning, final course grades, other coursework and work-life balance in mind.

Example: How Discord + Website Boosts Your Final Grade

For instance, you might not know why I choose to run class on Discord and an external website. I decided to do this after three consecutive semesters of students wanting to decouple from administrative surveillance, since running class exclusively on Classes means I have to comply with administrative protocols around grading: i.e., I have to count the number of hours you spend on Classes every day, how many hours you spend on different videos, slides, texts, and other materials every day, and how long you spend on discussion posts and other LMS-based activities. In short, mixed-modality or async courses on Classes force instructors to account for your participation with fixed numbers each day/week and make it difficult for us to defend lenient participation grades. Because I pivoted to Discord — where I can’t tally the total hours you spend on class each day and can be more forgiving of an occasional drop in participation and of late work — participation becomes a more informal activity that I can grade holistically and leniently. More concretely, this choice allows me to keep most final course grades within the B-range, whereas Classes-based participation forces me to assign grades along a bell curve distribution where the class average is usually a C or C+. Thus, the Discord + website combo was designed to protect you from how the university wants instructors to grade you, and therefore works in your favor!

For instance, the above information might change your perception of the use of Discord and an external website — even if you had initial difficulty with the platform.

The abbreviated description of my instructional approach is that I try my best to respect institutional constraints — which are often uncaring or indifferent to the realities of student needs — without sacrificing either compassion or rigor in my pedagogy. In other words, I strive to deliver on the top-tier education you’re paying for while accommodating your needs as much as possible, i.e. as much as I can “get away with” under the watchful eye of university administration.

Here are specific things I did and didn’t do this semester, in case it helps you more thoughtfully complete course evaluations:

What I Have No Control Over

• Reading and writing is expected in core writing courses
• Peer review is also expected in core writing courses
• I can’t control the fact that you selected an async course, i.e. I can’t accommodate difficulties with the async modality — such as self-motivation, time management, organizational skills, ability to navigate work on your own — if you were unable to regularly, synchronously meet with me to ensure these difficulties were addressed
• I can’t control difficulties with using Discord or navigating the website if you didn’t regularly use/visit these platforms
• In the event a score is disputed or in the event of an academic integrity violation, I’m unable to use my alt-grading policy, as other professors or committees have to get involved at that point, and your body of work for the course would need to be audited and assessed using the traditional A-F scale for all assigned work
• Because this is an async class and a student previously complained, I’m not allowed to require sync voice or text coffee chats with me — even short (5 min) sync chats planned around your schedule — and I’m not allowed to communicate with you in a manner that seems to expect sync discussion

What I Can (and Tried to) Control

• I reduced the amount of writing per week
• I reduced the amount of writing you would receive “sticky” grades on
• I use an alt-grading policy that’s cumulative and holistic, and I remit “Nc” scores in my final analysis when learning objectives are achieved
• I shifted away from the surveillance-oriented, time-bound metrics of Classes to informal platforms like Discord and an external website, where I couldn’t measure things like that even if I was ordered to (see the yellow callout above)
• I was available for 5+ hours of sync coffee chats each week, during set times and at alternate times (as long as you requested it at least 1 week in advance)
• I respected your schedules and reasons for taking an async class as much as my own schedule allowed and was available over Discord DM at odd hours (as many of you know)
• I accept work submitted 1 week after the original deadline without question or penalty
• I use an extremely lenient “attendance and participation” policy
• Sync dialogue is extremely important in core writing courses, so while I didn’t require sync coffee chats, I strongly recommended them and remained synchronously available at “random” times if we happened to be simultaneously online
• It is extremely difficult to actually fail — i.e. receive an “F” — in this course; a “C” is an average grade, but most final course grades tend to stay in the B-range or higher if you did everything you were asked to do in the spirit you were asked to do it and if you engaged in the course actively each week and worked with me synchronously or asynchronously to ensure your project was fulfilling course objectives

Course evaluations are anonymous and aren’t released to me until well after the conclusion of the semester (though realistically, writing instructors can often identify students based on their writing).

You can find the link to course evaluations on the Classes homepage. Please submit your completed course evaluations before the end of the semester to avoid any impacts to when your grades are released.

Final Coffee Chats

Finally, I no longer have availability outside my scheduled coffee chats for sync voice or text chats. If you’d like to chat one last time about your work, please check my calendar of availability and schedule accordingly.

Good Luck and Goodbye!

It was a pleasure working with all of you this semester! I look forward to reading your final qualitative research projects, and best of luck with all your future endeavors!