You tell them and tell them
This weekend I’ve fielded a few frantic emails from students. Their final essay is due next week. Apparently, some of them ignored the notice at the start of term that they’d have to decide their topics early in order to get sources. And they overlooked my warning three weeks ago that they’d better have their sources in hand or ordered on inter-library loan because our library, while well-supplied for an institution of this size, doesn’t have a wealth of material on every topic.
And it’s not like I’m asking for the moon, here. Some of my colleagues demand bibliographies of twenty items, minimum, in a senior-level essay. I don’t — I know that early modern history can sometimes be hard to find (so far, no one at the library really wants to acquire a subscription to Continuity and Change, for example) so I tell them it’s better to find a few, good sources. I’m pretty easy: senior students are only required to have seven sources for their papers, one of them a relevant primary source from our EEBO database. (And nothing from thrice-damned Wikipedia.)
So, why, given all of that, are students only now looking for sources for their papers?
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:01 am
I got tired of this myself; nowadays, a few weeks before the paper’s due, I require (even from graduate students) an annotated bibliography of the sources students have worked with up till that point.
That way, the scramble for sources happens earlier, and they have more time to look for what they really need, which often they will only have found out Just Then.
So that affects the grade on the final paper, but not as much if they’s totally screwed around till the last minute.
But no. They do NOT listen. And then they’re so shocked. I couldn’t find things! They weren’t all on JSTOR!
Yeah. Who knew.
Me, that’s who, and whoever was taking notes WEEKS AGO!
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Because they aren’t serious students?
April 6th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
They don’t believe you. I’m one of the academic librarians who tries to convince students that with a little lead time, we can help them find just about anything. I love my students, but I’m convinced that some of them have to fail at something before they’ll take their professor’s or my advice.