[I_teach_writing]

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At the beginning of a lot of courses I have taken, teachers will assign a small writing assignment to "see how I write". How much do you think teachers really read those to see how I write and use that information to grade future assignments later in the course?

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I find this type of activity useful for two reasons. The first is to see if a student has any *serious* problems with writing, to see if the class is appropriate for the student's ability with writing. I don't want a student to waste time if he/she needs to drop down to an easier class.

The second reason I give these assignments is that it helps me catch plagiarism later. If students do a short piece of writing on the first day, it's kind of like a fingerprint of the way in which a student writes, the "voice" of a student. Two points:

1) most plagiarism is laughably easy to identify if the instructor is a decent reader

2)I think plagiarism is a much more complex issue than most instructors realize, especially in the age of information and the internet. I don't consider it a "moral issue"; it just pisses me off when I waste my time reading something a student plagiarized.

Overall, these types of assignments have little to do with future grades.