Gene Editing Assignment 3 Paper

October 30, 2018

Joanna,

Your second submission was mistakenly returned to you with a grade of zero and without any explanation.

Please accept my apologies for that. That should never happen. It’s my responsibility to ensure that the

grading is correct and complete. My apologies.

In providing the needed feedback, I’m going to provide some lengthy comments, as well as a breakdown of

your grade using the rubric. Don’t let the length of the comments discourage you. I’m just trying to be as

complete and as clear as I can. You will be able to do better on the next assignments, as well as on the last

assignment, in which you put everything together.

I explain the situation in some general remarks, and then provide an breakdown of your points in the rubric.

There is some redudancy to this, in that I cover some of the same issues in both the general remarks and the

rubric breakdown.

General Remarks.

In grading your paper, I see that you’ve treated this as a general essay about a topic, but that’s not what the

instructions called for. The instructions called for you to address four specific areas with respect to your target

article: summary of the article; relate article to the course; relate article to your life; and give your opinion

regarding funding of research in this area. We were expecting a section on each area.

Your essay is completely missing two of those four areas. First, you haven’t related the article to the course or

vice versa. We wanted you to say something like “This relates to the course in that….”, and we wanted you to

then go into some detail about this. Secondly, you haven’t addressed the funding issue at all. The question is

how should research in this area be funded? Should public funds be spent on it? What is the role of private

funding?

In regards to the summary, you summarized some general information about a topic. However, this waasn’t

really a summary of an article. The article that you list as your target article, entitled “CRISPR/Cas9-mediated

gene editing in human tripronuclear zygotes” is far too technical for our purposes. You didn’t summarize it.

It’s too technical for SCI115 anyway, but you were supposed to summarize some article. We had compiled a

list of recommended articles for students to use. It would have been better to use one of those articles.

Breakdown with the Rubric.

Criterion

Points

possible

Points

earned Letter grade Comments

1. Summarize the article in

one (1) or more paragraphs,

using your own words.

Weight: 25%

20 12.0 D- You summarized some material, but you

didn’t provide the source. The target article

you’ve listed wasn’t summarized – it was

inappropriately technical. A summary of

some article was expected.

2. Identify which biological

concepts from the course

20 0 Zero This section is missing. I don’t see anywhere

that you’ve related the concepts you’ve

and / or text are relevant to

the topic covered in the

article.

Weight: 25%

described to the course.

3. Explain why the article

caught your attention. Relate

the article to your life and to

issues that are important to

you.

Weight: 20%

16 9.6 D- We were looking for a section in which you

spell out why the article caught your

attention. You don’t have a section like this,

but some of the things you summarized

about your topic are inherently interesting, so

I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here.

4. Discuss your opinion on

how research on this topic

should be funded.

Weight: 20%

16 0 Zero This section is missing.

5. Application of the SWS

standards for citation.

Weight: 5%

4 3.0 C You didn’t follow SWS-style formatting.

Instead, you seem to have followed APA-

style. On the positive side, you deserve

some points for using a citation method. On

the negative side, the article you’ve listed as

your target article is one that you didn’t use.

You must have used some other source, but

that’s not credited.

6. Use of proper written

mechanics.

Weight: 5%

4 3.4 B The writing is generally okay, I think.

TOTAL 80 28.0

SafeAssign

Before closing this letter, I wanted to address your SafeAssign similarity index of 51%. That means that

SafeAssign flagged 51% of your paper as possibly plagiarized. If that SafeAssign score had been accurate, we

would have not been able to accept your paper. Fortunately, it is not accurate. Visual inspection of the report

shows that this is due to material flagged in the reference section, which does not count against you. So, there

is really no problem with it.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

-- Dr. Jim Cox

cc: Dr. Trinna Johnson