College Evaluates Expos 10

Haley E. Bowen ’14 had waited until the last possible day to write her expository writing placement essay. She had been in Brussels for the past eleven and a half months for her gap year, and all she wanted to do was “walk the streets of Brussels and drink a beer,” she says. Instead, Bowen argued for the morality of favoring family members in ethical decisions while listening to the “Pride and Prejudice” soundtrack and eating Nutella.

“[Prioritizing family members] is more socially acceptable,” she says, describing her logic, which stitched together arguments from Confucius to a fictitious story of a family on a boat.

The Expository Writing Program receives over 1600 of these types of essays over the summer—pieces that draw from sources ranging from “Moby Dick” to the Constitution. These essays are reviewed by two preceptors who will determine the first of many essay grades that these students will receive during their time at Harvard.

The majority of students receive a high enough score to enroll in Expository Writing 20: “Expository Writing,” the standard mandatory introductory writing course for freshmen.

But each fall, an increasing number of students—147 last fall—will opt to first enroll in Expository Writing 10: “Introduction to Expository Writing.” Some take the course as a result of a recommendation based on a low placement essay score, while others sign up out of a desire to improve their writing skills.

Many of these students say they graduated from the course as stronger writers. The course has received consistently high Q Guide rankings—receiving a 4.3 last year—with students extolling the class for preparing them for future writing pursuits.

“Coming out of Expos 10, I probably wrote the best essay of my life for my bioethics class,” Stephanie N. Regan ’13 says.

Indeed, the Standing Committee on Writing and Speaking, chaired by Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, is currently one year into its evaluation of whether the Expos 10 program prepares its writers to be successful both in Expos 20 and their future courses at Harvard.

Unlike its less popular counterpart Expos 20, which has garnered mixed reviews, students praise Expos 10 for offering a course structure that allows them to think critically and write with sophistication.

EVALUATING EXPOS 10

Harris’s committee is currently exploring the ability of Expos 10 to train its students to become stronger thinkers and writers.

At the start of the fall semester, 12 percent of the Class of 2014 were recommended to take Expos 10 based on their performance on the placement essay, but 24 percent of these students opted out of taking the course.

Expos 10 is currently divided up into two units: the first essay, “Analyzing an Argument,” allows students to study issues surrounding higher education, while the second essay, “Testing a Theory,” gives students the opportunity to think critically about art.

The committee will soon report on its findings and suggest modifications to the current curriculum.

“It’s basically—‘What’s working, how can we improve it?’” says Thomas R. Jehn, director of the Harvard College Writing Program. “Is Expos 10 doing all it can for students who go into [the class]?”

Les Perelman, the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT, has been hired to conduct the ongoing assessment. He declined to comment about his role in the review.

Jehn says that the evaluation, which is currently collecting and processing data, may not be complete for a number of months.

He adds that Perelman will divulge his findings to Harris, who will then communicate those results to the College.

THE EXPOS 10 EXPERIENCE

Like many of her peers, Regan voluntarily enrolled in Expos 10 in the fall of her freshman year, feeling inadequately prepared for the challenges of college writing.

“I never felt like I was a really strong writer,” she says. “And that can really show in your writing down the road.”

Expos 10 preceptor Zachary C. Sifuentes ’97 says he thinks Expos 10 is successful for students like Regan, as the course allows students to make an active decision to dedicate themselves to improving their writing.

“I think everyone who chooses to take Expos 10 is demonstrating a kind of awareness that is at the heart of an educational institution,” he wrote in an e-mail.

When first beginning the art unit, Regan says she was skeptical about the value of the assignments, but she ended up surprised by her appreciation of the material.

“In a subject where I would have never cared about art, I actually found it extremely enjoyable,” she says.

Regan said that the two-essay structure of the course—instead of the three essays assigned in Expos 20—allowed her the time to more fully develop her ideas.

Other students similarly praised the program, but questioned the transferability of the skills they learned in the course.

“In Expos 10, I got more of the ideas of how to craft an essay,” Nancy Chen ’13 says. “I don’t know how much I applied them to other classes.”

But the course still sets up students to perform well in Expos 20, instructors say.

Joaquín S. Terrones, who is a preceptor for the “HIV Aids and Culture” section of Expos 20, called Expos 10 an “excellent course,” saying that students who have completed Expos 10 are better prepared to succeed in his spring Expos 20 course.

“They come really equipped with the vocabulary to think about the elements of what makes good academic writing,” he says. “Expos 10 really prepares them to be very attentive to their own writing and to be very mindful of the revision process and what that brings to their own work.”

Regan echoes Terrones’ sentiments about Expos 10.

“I would say that I felt a lot more prepared than I would have been if I had taken Expos 20 right away,” she says.

Though Regan says she enjoyed Expos 10, she describes her experience in Expos 20 the following semester as unsatisfactory.

EDITING EXPOS 10

Pending the Standing Committee’s report, Expos 10 will continue to be modified in the future. Jehn stressed the program’s commitment to frequent revision of Expos 10’s course structure.

“Unless the assessment reveals something quite dramatic about what we need to change, I’m very interested right now in tweaking the current curriculum so that we can do a better job of responding to students on their response papers,” Jehn says. “We don’t want them to ever feel as though the response paper experience is random.”

Jehn says that one of his top priorities in refining the course is improving communication between preceptors and students at every point of the writing process.

“We want to make sure that how we are giving feedback to students on each of those steps really helps them towards the draft,” says Jehn.

Jane Rosenzweig, the director of the Writing Center, says that the two types of essays assigned in Expos 10 will likely stay constant, but the topics of the units may change.

“There are plenty of arguments that can be analyzed, and plenty of theories that can be tested, and they don’t have to be about education and art,” she says.

Rosenzweig adds that the decision of whether to change the content of the units will likely be discussed over the summer.

Jehn says that he hopes the Standing Committee’s evaluation of Expos 10 will improve the program.

“At its best, what assessment does ... is to make you think in vibrant ways about the curriculum and teaching methods,” he says.

—Hana N. Rouse contributed reporting to this story.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.