In-Class Essay

In order for an in-class essay to be presented in a form supported by the department, essay prompts must not be given or posted via the web prior to the essay date. Allowing students to prepare outlines or theses beforehand undermines the goal of the in-class essay as a measure of extemporaneous writing skills.
Since our program is a text-based writing program, prompts should, like out-of-class essay prompts, generate text-based responses to previously assigned texts. Discussion: Although Regents’ topics have been used in the past as in-class prompts, these topics generally encourage personal response essays, not text-based writing, and can cause an awkward transition in an otherwise text-based course.

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