Guidance for TAs for how to assign grades on a term paper draft. Includes a single-category rubric for the draft (based on effort and completeness) as well as a single-category rubric for the final paper (based on quality). This second rubric was used to supply an “advisory grade” in addition to the first-draft effort/completeness grade. From MIT’s Principles of Applied Mathematics.
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This assignment for a term paper asks students to propose a topic, list at least two sources, and provide an outline of the paper. Included in the assignment is a list of suggested term paper topics related to the focus of the undergraduate seminar: Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic randomness. From Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T.
Read more →This lesson plan and handout are for an 80-minute workshop to prepare students to write their term papers. During the workshop, an instructor provides guidance for choosing an appropriate focus for the paper (counterexample: “Everything I know about the Island of Corsica”); students talk with classmates to focus their topics; and the class discusses rhetorical differences among papers, presentations, and psets; the writing in two versions of the same paragraph; the structure of a paper; LaTeX; and acknowledging sources. From Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic.
Read more →This e-mail to graders in a large communication-intensive math class provides guidance for how to recognize plagiarism and what to do if they read a term paper that they suspect contains plagiarism.
Read more →This assignment guides students to choose a term paper topic that will enable them to “add value” beyond what is provided in their sources (e.g., explaining the material clearly to an audience of students, synthesizing the presentations in multiple sources, etc.). The assignment, which is from M.I.T.’s Principles of Applied Mathematics, includes a list of suggested topics in discrete applied mathematics.
Read more →This one-page handout about acknowledging sources in mathematics papers addresses how to avoid using wording from sources and how to cite information or wording. Examples are included (with citation).
Read more →This assignment is from Andrew Snowden’s Undergraduate Seminar in Topology at MIT. The final paper is an approximately 10 page exposition on a topic in algebraic topology not covered in our seminar. The paper must be written in Latex (or some other flavor of Tex). You must select the topic for your paper by March 7th. I’d prefer that no two of you do the same topic, so if there’s something you’d really like to do you should tell me soon. When you know what you want to do, just send me an e-mail. Below is a list of possible
Read more →[The following notes are about Steven Kleiman’s 2010 Undergraduate Seminar in Computational Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, in which the students give the lectures and write a term paper. The main page for this course is here.] The term paper is to be a ten-page essay on a topic related to the course. The goal is for you to learn something new, and to explain it clearly to others in the class, or better, to other upper-class math majors. The paper must be written in a professional style, and formatted in AMS-LaTeX, like the papers in MIT’s Undergraduate Journal of
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