Writing Critiques

As part of a graduate course in Mechanical Engineering students were required to write two brief papers during the semester. The students in the course were broken into groups of approximately 12 students. Each student would submit their paper to the group which was required to read the paper and write a brief (1 paragraph) critique of the paper. The first two critique submissions were relatively open-ended, but later critiques required the students to evaluate the content, style, look for extraneous information and not focus so much on grammar and spelling.

At the beginning of the semester the students required to write two papers and at least 22 critiques were relatively unhappy with this component of the class. By the end of the semester all of the students overwhelmingly agreed that this process was extremely beneficial and highly recommended continuing the practice. What follows is a brief list of best-practices and suggestions for implementing this idea in a course.

• At the beginning of the semester, before classes start, divide the entire class into groups of approximately 12 students.
• The papers are due on a staggered basis. The first due date is two weeks after the class has started and one person from each group is required to submit their paper at this time
• Each class period thereafter a paper is due from one person from each group
• The other members of each group are required to write a 1 paragraph critique of the paper submitted in their group within 2 days
• The critique should be worth some points (to encourage participation) and should be submitted to the paper author and the instructor through email
• The paper author has 3 days from the receiving the critiques to submit the final draft to the instructor
• This process is repeated a second time so each student writes two papers

When I first started this I would allow students to choose their own topic. I only requested that it related to the topics of the course in some way. However, I quickly found that this is not the best way to get good papers. I highly recommend that a list of paper topics be developed by the instructor and the students are required to choose a topic off of the list. This has two advantages, the first is that you can be sure the topics relate to the class material and thus does not waste the other student's time in the class reading papers not related to the course, and second (and more importantly) if you choose modern research topics, then the student will have to actually spend a little time researching the paper which results in much better papers. The self-picked topic papers were usually very poorly researched and not very informative.