Research Papers

On December 15th, I assigned a 3-4 page research paper about WWI on a topic of the students' choosing. The assignment was due January 5th. I've graded one full class so far and generally they've been good until I came to the last student of the class's paper.

Requirements: 3-4 pages, 12 point Times New Roman font, 1" margins, etc.
First off, he handed in his paper a day late (the penalty is that 10% of the total points is subtracted from your grade). Secondly, if you are ever going to email a teacher your paper - send it as a PDF so that all those little tricks you used to make your paper longer can't all be fixed back to what they should have been originally.

This future leader extended the margins and used justified alignment. But the paper still looked weird, the font was TNR like it was supposed to be and was 12 point the whole paper. I talked to one of my roommates and we discovered you can change the spacing between each word too. This kid had set it to "extended spacing" so that his paper was that much longer.

First is a picture of how his paper was formatted when he submitted it. Second is his paper with proper formating.

kids are great.