Abe Stone
Assignment FAQ

If you even have to ask, almost certainly not. Students do fail my courses, but normally only because they literally don’t do important parts of the assigned work (or are caught plagiarizing on important parts of it). I’m not saying it would be impossible to submit such absolutely worthless stuff that I would feel compelled to fail you, but you would know it if you were doing that. If you’re trying at all seriously to pass, you can rest assured that you are.

No. Well, maybe, I mean if you punched me in the nose or something, but, normally, no. For example, if you’re doing poorly in the course and not taking it seriously, I’m not angry at you for that reason. I try to make my course worth what you guys are paying for it, but I don’t think for a second that it’s the most important thing in the universe, and I also know you may have had limited choice as to what courses you could take. You need to set your own priorities.

I’m really sorry about that. I honestly don’t want to cause stress and anxiety to anyone, but I know my assignments can be difficult. It’s quite difficult, on my end, to come with assignments that are meaningful — that you might actually learn something from doing, for example — without being really hard. The best I can say is to remember that, if it’s so difficult for you, it’s probably difficult for a lot of other students, too. I always take the overall level of responses to any assignment as a sign of what it was reasonable to expect, and I grade accordingly.

Yes, sure, please ask me about any of these things, and I’ll do the best I can to help. You should know, however, that I’m often exhausted and overwhelmed with all kinds of stuff and don’t always get to my email that quickly. In a course with TA’s, you might want to try your TA instead or in addition. You can also come to my office hours. (These should be listed on the syllabus, and if they ever change for any reason I will update that, as well as sending an email announcement to the class.)

Cowell Annex A-106. Cowell Annex is not the main Cowell building on top of the hill (where, confusingly, there is also an office 106); it’s the much smaller, one story building farther down the hill, right before you get to the huge lawn or cow pasture or whatever that is. If you walk into the door of Cowell Annex and turn slightly left to avoid crashing into the water cooler, you’ll be in front of the door to my office.

Usually the list of all TA’s, with email addresses, is on the syllabus (which you should be able to find on-line via my general course page). Once it’s settled who’s teaching which section (for courses with more than one TA), I’ll add that information, as well, so if you know what time your section is, you should be able to find out who you TA is from there. If the course has an eCommons site, you should also be able to find out your section and TA from there.

Honestly I don’t care if you get it in a few minutes late or whatever. But the official answer, for most if not all of my assignments, is midnight on the due date. (On eCommons this sometimes shows up as 11:59:59 pm on that day, sometimes as 12:00 am the next day, depending.) If you really want to be sure, check the syllabus, the on-line assignment instructions, or, if applicable, eCommons.

Yes. This doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get full credit for it. You should contact me or your TA to ask about that: in advance, preferably, but, if not, then after the fact.

Not automatically, but if you contact me I’ll reset the eCommons thing to let you do so.

Brief extension: quite likely, if you need it. Ask! In a course with TA’s, I would appreciate it if you try asking your TA first.

If you have serious problems and feel that you will need a long extension, an incomplete, or what have you, please contact me and we’ll talk.

If you were unable to hand something in, or simply neglected to, and are now afraid that it’s too late to do anything about it: it can’t hurt to ask.

If I’m the one who’s grading it, I’m doing it as fast as I can. Still, don’t be afraid to ask me (I will not be angry at you for asking). If your assignment is being graded by a TA, then I can ask them if you want, but you might as well ask them yourself.

Yes, please.

The short answer is “no.” The page limits are guidelines to how much content I expect. It will certainly affect your grade some if your paper has substantially less content to it than expected (or substantially more content than expected: remember that I or the TA’s have to read all this!). This isn’t necessarily a matter of length, but if your paper is short (or long) that might be a warning sign.

One way or the other, there is no sudden drop to zero here. If your paper is short on content, it will set your grade back, but that’s still only one among various factors to be considered in grading.

In general I’m completely flexible about this, as long as you somehow make it reasonably clear (to me or the TA, depending who’s grading) what you are citing. If you’re using only the texts I ordered for a course, you’ll normally be fine with a very short citation, which you can put in parentheses if you prefer. If you used other editions or outside sources, you’ll need to say more to make your source clear. There are various accepted ways of doing that, but I don’t care which if any of them you use.

A bibliography or “Works Cited” page shouldn’t be necessary except maybe for very long papers which cite a lot of outside stuff.

Roughly speaking, plagiarism is when you put forward someone else's ideas, work, or conclusions as if they were your own, i.e. without citing your source. Technically, it’s possible to do this without using any of the same words as the text you're plagiarizing: that is, merely paraphrasing is not a defense. If you feel unsure what might constitute plagiarism, or what other kinds of academic misconduct there may be, you can find some information and links to further resources here.

If I feel that you've plagiarized on an assignment I will inform you of this and ask to meet. Assuming I don’t come away convinced of your innocence (which is unlikely, because I don’t normally do this except in smoking-gun cases), you will have to decide whether to admit guilt or contest the charge. Either way, I will forward the case to your college provost for further action.

If you admit to plagiarizing, or are found to have plagiarized, there are two basic consequences, called academic sanctions and disciplinary sanctions. The academic sactions are up to me, and what I normally do is give no credit for the specific assignment, or specific part of the assignment, on which you plagiarized. This means that you may or may not still pass the course. I do reserve the right to take stronger action if a case is somehow particularly heinous. The disciplinary sanctions are determined by your provost and could in theory be quite severe (e.g. expulsion), though for a first offense they typically would not be.

Yes, please do! That is: please discuss ideas, read each other's stuff and make suggestions, ask other students for help on points you don’t understand, etc.

However: please make sure that what you actually hand in is unambiguously your own work, not shared with or derivative from someone else’s. As in the case of plagiarism, I don’t normally proceed to accuse anyone of anything unless the case is fairly clear cut, so there's no need to be paranoid about small overlaps in wording here or there. But, also as in the case of plagiarism, simply changing some words or paraphrasing a bit won’t protect you: two papers with the exact same detailed structure, same examples in the same order, etc. count as obvious evidence of misconduct, even if the wording is slightly different everywhere.

No, not normally (in rare cases this may be allowed, but only with prior permission of both instructors). This is called “multiple submission,” and it’s treated quite seriously, just like plagiarism.

Yes. This is accepted practice in contemporary philosophy writing.

The answer is basically that you should quote or cite no more and no less than you need to to support your argument.

To clarify, there are three basic cases:

a. Your point, or the further course of your argument, depends in some way on calling the reader’s attention to the exact words the author uses. For example, you might be pointing out that, although one might get the impression that the author says so-and-so, when you look carefully all the text actually says is “ … ”. Or you might be introducing a phrase or short passage whose meaning is unclear, in order to discuss various possibilities. Or you might be introducing some text in order to claim something about it: for example, that it is metaphorical, or that it is an allusion to some other author. In cases like this, you will want to say exactly what the text says — that is, quote it directly. But even in a case like this it’s often best to make the quote short and incorporate it into your own sentence. (For example: “All Socrates actually says at this stage is that ‘ … ’ (citation).”)

b. Your point depends on the fact that the text says something at some particular point, such that a reader might want to check that it really does say that, but your point doesn’t depend on the exact wording there. In that case it’s usually better to paraphrase and cite, rather than quoting. (For example: “Descartes goes on to claim that he, as a thinking thing, is certainly not a body (citation).”)

c. Your point is supported only by the text as a whole (or some big part of it), and/or is something that no one who has ever read the text could forget. In this case you should just say what you think is right; a citation is not going to help. (For example: “Socrates never gets angry at his interlocutors, even when they seem to frustrate his intended line of argument”; “The First Meditation reaches the conclusion that all of the Meditator’s old opinions are subject to doubt”; “Hegel’s style is difficult”; “Descartes can come across as arrogant.”)

Two main rules of thumb that may help you think about this. First, everything in your assignment, even what’s between quotation marks, is said by you. When you quote directly, you are telling the reader what someone else said (it’s not as if you’ve taken a temporary break to let someone else talk instead). You need to have a reason to tell the reader that, just as you need a reason to say everything else in the paper. Second, to make a serious point you always need to take a risk that a reader will think you’re wrong. It would be very safe to say: “Descartes writes: ‘[entire text of the Meditations].’ The End,” but you would not actually have claimed anything of interest. “Descartes can come across as arrogant” is much riskier, but also much more useful.

The short answer is that (in assignments to which this question applies) you are definitely supposed to have an opinion, and to care about whether it’s a true opinion: namely, an opinion about what those old, dead people meant. In particular, in any assignment that is a proper paper (as opposed to just the answer to an essay question), you are supposed to think up your own original, arguable thesis about what they meant. It’s usually not at all easy to tell. There’s a lot to argue about.

The long answer is too long to give here, because it would be the answer to a very difficult philosophical problem, one over which both old, dead people and new, live ones have puzzled ad nauseam: what use to philosophers is the history of philosophy?

If you answer “no use at all,” then some of the old, dead people will back you up, at least in terms of what they said, if not in terms of what they did. Descartes would be the most important example. But most of the others, live and dead, would not agree with you. This means that what you then would be doing, if you followed your own advice, would be quite different from what has mostly been called “philosophy.” Maybe, in the end, that’s not a problem, but it does seem at least worth worrying about.

If we agree, however, that “no use at all” is the wrong answer, then it’s still very far from clear what the right answer is. If you pay careful attention, you may learn something about how I would answer. I can say at least this: that in philosophy it’s often hard to know whether we’re asking good questions or not (about, for example, whether we know the world exists, or whether we have free will, etc.), and one way to address the problem is often to figure out, first, when and why people started to ask just those questions, and, second, what other questions may have been ruled out or superseded in the process. But, beyond that, this is too serious a topic for me to take up in a FAQ.