Treatment Description and Grading Rubric

Version 21 November 2007

Each entry should include publication information in the bibliographic style indicated in the syllabus. This should go above the treatment paragraph. The treatment includes five sentences that compose a single paragraph.

The first sentence identifies the article's title, the author's full name, and a statement about the reading that identifies the main point (the thesis) or topic of the reading using the word "obvious".
In "The use of copied code", it is obvious that Josh Tenenberg believes that code copied from others should clearly be cited as such, otherwise it is plagiarism.
The second sentence describes a less obvious, but equally important idea from the reading, using an adjective like "important," "interesting" or "significant".
Another important idea that Tenenberg discusses is that since most discussions of plagiarism are with respect to "works in written and spoken language", he wants to discuss how to cite the work of others within computer programs.
The third sentence supports the less obvious idea of the second sentence, and uses the word "supports":
He supports this latter idea by stating that due credit is given to others by specifying the original author, the source where the code was obtained, and any alterations that the current author is making to the original code.
The fourth sentence answers the question "How does the author's decision to write this way affect the meaning of the reading?" and uses the phrase "in order to" as a way to lead to an encapsulation of the purpose of the reading and its context.
The author provides citation examples where the copied code is from a textbook, an instructor, the Internet, from multiple sources, and from code that is "common knowledge" in order to show how one can clearly identify the author of each code unit in a variety of situations.
The fifth sentence identifies a single, specific audience and provides a brief rationale. I recommend that you answer this question first (even though it is presented last in the treatment), since the meaning of a reading often is not clear until one understands to whom the writing is directed. Note that this is the intended audience that the author had in mind, not an audience that might benefit.
A target audience is computer science students, since this article is a tutorial for those that might be unaware of the issues and it is linked from his course syllabus.

Consider that the audience for your treatments consists of college level students in CSS who have not read the paper that you are describing. Consider that the purpose of your treatments is to provide sufficient information so that the reader can determine whether or not to read the article itself.

Your treatments will be evaluated along the following dimensions, in the order of importance as given:

Treatment truthfulness: Do your statements correspond faithfully to the article? You should be prepared to defend your position (which is what you'll need to do if you would like to win back points deducted for this). Also, your treatment argument itself should provide an argument for your position. Claims that are unsubstantiated by the paper (or an inference from it) or misunderstood may result in reductions.
Treatment Structure: Have you followed the treatment structure as specified above?
Clarity/Simplicity: Are all of the words and sentences carrying their own weight? Could you have simplified your writing? Is there ambiguity or vagueness?
Grammar: Are there any grammatical errors? Have you written the citation correctly? Reading the sentence out loud can help.

The treatment description above is borrowed almost verbatim from the treatment guidelines by Michael Kucher in IAS (who adapted it from John Peterson, also in IAS). My main alteration is to split his first sentence into two sentences. Also, I provided a different example treatment.