Science Communication (Writing) Requirement
A DRAFT proposal for the Science Communication (Writing) Requirement is included below. If approved by the faculty board on May 10, 1999, it will apply to the Class of 2002. Please send any comments, suggestions, and questions to Melvin Leok <mleok@cco.caltech.edu>
Proposal of the CCSC regarding the scientific writing requirement
1) Background. The current (1998 -99) Caltech catalog lists as an Institute requirement completion of a three unit science communication course.(p.156) This refers to a course in scientific writing and not to the courses in oral communication that presently exist in most options. A footnote adds that, " The way in which this requirement is to be met has not yet been finalized. It is to be met in the junior or subsequent years by the current sophomore or later class and thus is not needed by any student during the current year". The requirement was instituted in response to the widespread feeling among Caltech faculty that many students lack basic writing skills, especially in connection with scientific writing. Although writing is emphasized in Humanities courses, students do not at present take courses that aim specifically at teaching the skills necessary to write scientific papers or reports of scientific research. The requirement is meant to fill this gap.
The previous recommendations of the CCSC regarding the
science writing requirement envisioned setting up classes in
science writing as a way of meeting the requirement. In 1997,
the CCSC proposed assigning responsibility for such classes to
the individual options, on the model of the oral component of
the communication requirement, with the classes to be taught by
personnel from those options. It will be recalled that after
considerable discussion the faculty board failed to adopt this
proposal. A number of faculty said that they and their colleagues
lacked the training to provide such a course and that it would
be difficult to find faculty in their options willing to teach
it. The matter was consequently thrown back in the CCSC's lap,
with the suggestion that we come up with some other proposal.
A second possibility, also considered by the CCSC and discussed
with the Faculty Board in 1998, envisioned setting up a generic
Institute - wide science writing class. Responsibility and staffing
for this class would not rest with the individual options. Instead
the class would be staffed by outside professionals. In response
to this second proposal, it was argued that because practices
in writing scientific papers differ very substantially across
scientific disciplines, a truly generic course in science writing
would not be very useful to students. It was also suggested that
it might be difficult to find the required outside professionals
The current proposal of the CCSC is that in order to satisfy
the science writing requirement each student must publish an article
in an electronic journal to be established by Caltech. This would
be the only way of satisfying the requirement. The idea is described
in more detail immediately below.
2) Publication in the Electronic Journal. Every student must complete
the same requirement: publication of a paper in the electronic
journal. The papers must be in English and a minimum of 1500 words.
The paper must be on some topic relating to science (including
social science) or engineering and it must be acceptable as a
piece of expository writing - it should be grammatical, intelligible,
coherent, well - organized and so on. The paper may report original
scientific research but since the object is to demonstrate writing
skills, it need not take this form. Scientific writing at a popular
or Scientific American level would be accepted for publication
as long as the writing itself was of sufficiently high quality.
Suitable papers would include papers based on SURF projects, #
papers based on written work in science and engineering (but
not Humanities) classes, and papers written specifically for the
journal. Papers that consist exclusively of proofs or calculations,
without an expository component, are not acceptable.
In order to avoid problems with students who wait until
late in their senior year before attempting to fulfill the requirement,
we recommend that students must complete the requirement during
their junior year. Each student will select a faculty member who
will act as mentor during the writing of the paper. It will be
the responsibility of the faculty mentor to offer help and feedback
with the paper. The faculty mentor will determine whether the
paper is of sufficient quality to be published in the electronic
journal and hence whether the student has satisfied the writing
requirement. No faculty member will be required to supervise
more than one paper but faculty members who are not already committed
to supervising a paper must agree to do so when asked, # as long
as the proposed topic is suitable for publication in the journal.
# The paper need not be in the faculty member's area of expertise.
Since there are slightly more faculty than juniors, most faculty
will be involved in the supervision of one and only one paper.
When the paper is published in the electronic journal, the faculty
mentor as well as the student author would be indicated. Faculty
on sabbatical would be excused from this obligation.
Student faculty pairing would be on a first come, first
served basis. A web page would be maintained for this purpose.
It would provide students with information about faculty who are
not yet committed as mentors and would permit students to select
any of these as the faculty member they wish to work with.
We anticipate that most papers will require extensive
re-writing and revision before they meet the standard for publication.
Hence an important part of the responsibility of the faculty will
be to work closely with students they are mentoring, providing
feedback about their submissions and making suggestions about
revisions. In order to allow sufficient time for revision, students
will be required to submit a draft of their paper by the end of
the first term of their junior year and a final version by the
end of the second term of the junior year. #Students would be
required to register for a one unit course in science writing
in the first term of the junior year and a two unit course in
the second term. In order to recieve credit for the first term
students would need to complete an acceptable draft. In order
to recieve credit for the second term students would be required
to complete the final version of the paper in a form suitable
for publication in the electronic journal. The course would thus
be graded on a pass/fail basis only. Students who fail to complete
a draft by the end of the first term or the final version by
the end of the second term would, at the discretion of the faculty
mentor, recieve either an E or an F. Failure to meet deadlines
would thus be handled in the same way as failure to complete the
requirements in any other course#.
Discussion. The version of this proposal discussed at the April faculty board meeting envisioned that feedback on the papers would be provided by graduate student paper czars. Many board members doubted that there are enough graduate students who write sufficiently well for this idea to work. The current proposal addresses this difficulty by asking Caltech faculty to provide feedback about writing. Since each faculty member will be required to mentor at most one student per year, the burden on faculty would be relatively small. We estimate that mentoring would take, on average, about five hours over the course of an entire academic year.
Another matter of concern to both the faculty board and
the CCSC is that the burden of implementing the writing requirement
be shared equitably. It is for this reason that the CCSC proposes
that faculty who are not already committed to supervising a paper
must agree to do so when asked. The committee fears that without
such a requirement, some faculty will do no mentoring at all and
that others will end up mentoring a number of students. The rationale
for requiring faculty to mentor papers outside their area of expertise
is similar. Because the ratio of undergraduates to faculty varies
a great deal across the options, allowing faculty to refuse to
supervise papers outside their area would again mean that the
burden of mentoring was distributed unequally. If the system of
faculty supervision we are proposing is to be workable, the faculty
burden must be kept relatively small and this requires some mechanism
that insures that the work of mentoring be spread over the whole
faculty and not concentrated on just a few.
Under the current proposal, publication in the electronic
journal is the sole way of meeting the writing requirement. The
CCSC discussed the possibility of allowing students to meet the
requirement by publishing a paper in any reputable scientific
journal. The consensus, also reflected in the April faculty Board
meeting, was that most published papers are co-authored with faculty
members, and that, typically, faculty members do most or all
of the actual writing. Thus such publications do not really
demonstrate that students have the skills that the writing requirement
demands. On those relatively rare occasions in which a published
paper is written by an undergraduate, it could be submitted to
the electronic journal and the student would be able to satisfy
the writing requirement in this way.
Another issue discussed by the CCSC is the relation of
the science writing requirement to present courses such as Ph10
and Ge 10 that have a written component. At present, a few options
have such courses but most do not. Even when they exist, such
courses do not in their current form provide detailed feedback
about writing. The CCSC considered the possibility of also allowing
students to satisfy the science writing requirement by passing
a three unit courses set up for this purpose by those options
that wished to do so. The majority view on the CCSC is that it
is preferable to have a system in which publication in the electronic
journal way of meeting is the only way of meeting the writing
requirement. This imposes a single, uniform standard on all students
and avoids complaints that may arise if some options institute
writing classes as an alternative way of satisfying the requirement
and others do not. Of course, options would still be free to
set up writing courses if they wished to do so, and students would
be free to submit papers written for such classes to the electronic
journal. Staffing. As presently envisioned, the electronic journal
would not require an editor or editorial board. Each faculty mentor
would decide whether the final version of a student paper was
acceptable for publication - the faculty are the (distributed)
editors. Staff would be required to maintain the journal and web
site that allows students to select faculty mentors but this work
could be carried out by undergraduates. Of course an editor or
editorial board might be appointed in the future if on-going experience
with the journal indicated this was desirable.
#
Implementation for next year. Assuming that the requirement
is accepted by the faculty board this academic year, the CCSC
proposes that it be optional for next year's juniors and mandatory
for juniors in following years. Making the proposal optional for
next year means that the electronic journal would be operative
next year and that juniors who wished to do so could submit a
paper which if accepted would earn them three units of credit.
This would provide us with experience in the operation of the
journal and allow us to correct problems before the introduction
of the mandatory system the following year.