Presentation Evaluation Rubric General: Fill & Download for Free

I’m not talking from theory, we base all learning at our school on collaborative, problem based, project based learning, and have done for the past 30 years with excellent resultsIt works very well if you establish roles ( Leader, Investigator, Proposer, Recorder)Establish rules (respect, talk one at a time, participate. etc)Establish process (define project, brainstorm, investigate, proposal, action, presentation, evaluation)Establish the evaluation guidelines (Rubrics, checklists, feedback etc)and of course, the teacher must monitor, observe and give constructive feedback constantlyGenerally at preschool and grade school level we work with teams of four, we change the members of the teams every month, we make sure that each member has an opportunity to experience a different role with each project. We also work with constructive conflict resolution and a concept of restorative justice. We don’t use reinforcements, but logical consequences.We have very few, I’m talking almost zero, discipline problems, and these are mostly caused by kids new to the school during the first 4 months of their stay here.

That is a really tough question. I think the easiest way is to answer by analogy.You have a child. Starting from birth you observe their personality. You teach them what you think they need to know. You correct their mistakes of action early, and their mistakes of theory later. You develop a certain, specific, appropriate level of trust in them.Flash forward sixteen years. Now you are presented with a terrifying judgement to make; Can I let my child drive? Do I feel comfortable giving them control of three quarters of a ton of potential murder, which will mostly be used outside my direct supervision? Oh yeah… and I remain liable for their actions to boot! That’t tough.A general is very much like that child, except that nearly every child (understandably) feels entitled to drive at some point. Very, very few people will ever be generals. We just don’t need that many.It starts at officer selection. There are several ways one can become an officer. None of them are as easy as enlisting (which is no cake-walk to begin with.) The Army used an up-or-out system when I was in, which stated that if you were passed over for promotion twice you would be kicked out. Keep the best. Toss the rest.Up until a certain point (0–5 if I remember correctly), every promotion board is basically a death match with a rubric to keep it objective. Part of that rubric is your the Officer Evaluation Report. Due partially to how competitive promotions are, and partially simple grade inflation, you literally were de facto required to score PERFECTLY on it. One 4/5 score (Good) instead of 5/5 (Outstanding) in any area and you needed to start sending resumes out to fast food restaurants.After that point (starting with 0–6 I think) the decision no longer included even a hint of objectivity. Fairness is for junior enlisted men. The deliberations on who was to be promoted were not public, reasons were not often given, and personal relationships with Congresspeople/The Secretary of the Army became important currency.The similarity is that the Army spends 16+ years carefully training, observing, correcting, and judging an ever shrinking pool of people until they have someone they trust to put in charge of a murder machine much larger than a Prius. That guy rarely if ever will dramatically step off the reservation. He was carefully selected not to have the temperament, conditioned hard most of his life to act in a certain way, and finally forced to have personal, ongoing, one-on-one relationships with the specific civilians who oversee him.So you might say there is a comfort level.Which is good, because the job demands it.There are US Statutes military officers are bound by. There are directives given by the President, and by Congress. There are regulations promulgated by the DoD and his service proper. There are international laws that in some cases supersede our own. There are traditions and customs. There are expectations his subordinates have of him. There are unspoken political imperatives. There are purely logistical demands, and matters of decorum. Oh yeah… and his wife and kids probably insist on silly shit like him grilling steaks on the weekend.The General must balance all of those demands. The worst/best part? The majority of them are ambiguous!Can you use a surplus in the petroleum reserve fund as a slush fund?The DoD hasn’t spoken on this issue yet so we need a quick answer… we just had our first transexual soldier arrive from training. Which barracks do we house her in? She needs to unpack her bags.We have a convoy travelling from Washington State to Alaska through Canada with their permission. Someone screwed up in a snowstorm and we accidentally “invaded” a Canadian indian reserve seeking the shelter of a low hill. No one seems to have noticed. Do we tell anyone or just try to pretend we were never there? Quick General, it’s your call!A general is granted amazing, overwhelming, terrifying levels of discretion and command authority. He also is bound by considerations of mind boggling gravity and complexity. He is expected to act decisively, but knows everything he does is subject to second (and third and fourth) guessing by everyone from his own subordinates in the privacy of their barracks, to Congress, to the media, to his Inspector General, to history, to his own inevitably tortured conscience.If he wanted to raze Sioux City for shits and giggles, depending on the logistics of his unit and loyalty of his men, he could probably do so if he played his cards right. That’s power. He’d almost certainly be stripped of command, face a court martial, and be executed. I suppose that is a limit to his power. (The “almost” here doesn’t represent any chance of getting away with his crime. There is a good chance his own men would figure out what he was up to and stop him either by pointing or firing a weapon at him.)If he wanted to remove the theoretical transexual soldier listed above from his command, he’d have the choice of doing it indirectly (which he’d almost certainly succeed in) by choosing and simultaneously bearing down on a score of pressure points (he has a hand in her commanders Officer Evaluation Report for instance), or if he were too dumb to live he could do so immediately and directly. That would lead to his immediate removal from command. It would also be followed by that trans soldier being reinstated.So he could burn an American city to the ground, but not directly throw out a single soldier he found distasteful.My final thought on this admittedly too-long treatise is that a parable can often explain what concrete examples cannot. Do you watch Game of Thrones?Varys is basically the Seven Kingdoms Director of National Intelligence. At one point he poses a “riddle” (I’m pretty sure it’s really a parable) about power:A King, A Priest, and a Rich Man with his Gold are all in a room with a single sellsword. They all order the sellsword to kill the other two. Who lives?(Digression: If it were a riddle, the answer would be “The Sellsword”, but that would teach nothing.)The lesson is that power resides where (armed) men think it does.A general has been put in charge of tens or even hundreds of thousands of men. Those men have been conditioned to respect his authority for most of their adult lives. They are part of an organization that is likely to have turned around or in many cases actually saved their lives, in which some of their colleagues have given their lives, and all of the people in that organization start with the (disprovable) presumption that the generals word is law. Moreover, once bullets start flying they are conditioned to (absent a war crime) wait for things to settle down before looking too close at questionable behavior.Those men will let him do a lot. For awhile. So long as they don’t disagree too strongly and no one who’s authority they respect more contradicts him. That is the nature of a generals power, which I think may be a clearer question than “how much” power he has.

You have asked a great question. Thank you for asking it. Let me start by quoting James Carvel who once said “There’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Which do you want?”I can’t give you “nothing but the truth” simply because I don’t have access to it. No one does. And I can’t give you the whole truth both as I cannot speak for the full range of application readers and I can’t speak for the policies and practices of thousands of colleges and universities. Instead, what I can give is a bit of the knowledge I have of what some schools do and what I myself did reading applications over many years. My answer, then, is limited, but I do think that what I will say might be applicable to more than just my own point of view, but I can’t back this up with quantifiable data.A while back I posted a blog entry on Quora called reading fast and slow: which are you doing right now Reading Fast and Slow: which are you doing right now? About 35,000 people have viewed it and hundreds have up voted it. I mention this as some of what I say there applies to your question. I won’t repeat what I said there but I will state that there are fast and slow reads when it comes to applications.Fast ReadsThere are actually several versions of what I call fast read applications. The first applies mostly to highly selective schools, but does filter down to the others too.Among a group of 20,000 applications there are going to be some students who did not quite get the memo about finding schools within a realistic range. These students apply to some of the most selective schools in the world even though their academic credentials are, if not downright weak (there are a few of these too), then they’re at least not even close to the profile of admitted students. With websites like Parchment, students can easily get a good idea of their chances of being admitted. There really is not much of an excuse any more for submitting applications to schools with little or no chance of getting in. (There will always be pressure from parents or the students themselves, however, that impose a willful blindness, despite the data.) A student who is not close to the numeric rubrics is more often than not going to get nothing more than a cursory read of his or her essays. Some schools or some readers won’t even bother.The other group of fast reads comes from the opposite end. There are a number of students who have submitted numbers that are so strong that the essays won’t have much bearing either as these schools (usually not at the top of selectivity) take virtually everyone who has demonstrated they can achieve success via the numbers and academic program. Some of these schools may not get 20,000 applications but many of them do as they are often State Schools with large numbers of in state applicants and those students have have done everything right and as residents won’t have to do a Proust to get in. To support my assertions I will quote Mitchell Stevens, whose book on admission, Creating a Class, is quite good. He knows how the process works based on spending time in an admission office. He has recently addressed the essay issue in The New Republic:Applications with clearly high or low composite metrics, relative to the college’s overall applicant pool, were ruled on quickly. It was the files in the messy middle of each year’s applicant pool, whose numbers made them neither obvious “admits” nor clear “denies,” that got more extensive attention.Yet even in these middling cases, personal essays rarely got even cursory attention from admissions officers. There were simply too many files to consider in too small a time frame, and too many other evaluative factors that mattered much more. How likely was an applicant to accept our offer of admission? Had we already accepted anyone from his or her remote zip code? Had the applicant received any special endorsement from a college alumnus or a faculty member? Did someone in the office owe a favor to the applicant’s guidance counselor? Those are the questions that get debated before a verdict is reached. But during the hundreds of deliberations I sat in on over two admission cycles, I literally never heard a decision made on the basis of a personal essay alone.Stop Obsessing Over Your College Essay—Admissions Officers Don'tAnother way to approach your question is to frame it from the other side. If you were an admission officer and you opened up an application on your computer the first things you generally look at after the basic information contained on the Common App (and almost all schools that get 20,000 apps use Common App) is the testing and transcript. If a student is not in the top 20% of the class and has scores a couple of hundred points below the mean would you as a reader who has a huge number of applications stacked up spend a lot of time reading the essays? Honestly? Really? Even if you say yes, I would want to ask the same question after you had been doing this day after day week after week month after month. While stats can be deceiving they can be useful too. Students who are not close to the numeric rubrics of highly selective schools virtually never, ever get in unless they are a special (athlete, development case, under-represented student etc.). A typical student who is white or Asian who is not at or even well above the average set of scores with a great program, and great grades has almost no chance of getting in to the most selective schools. Let’s just say, however, there is a student with a set of essays so wonderful that if a reader would mull them over they might try to make a case to look past a low set of numbers. Now comes the pragmatics of a cost benefit analysis. If a school misses out on one great writer how much of loss is it to the school. If the school has to hire more readers in order to insure that all application essays are read carefully in order to find one or two a year is it worth it? If a reader has to put in many, many more hours reading over each application slowly is it worth it to them to put in overtime to do so? If a school misses one or two great voices each year will it hurt the quality of the class. And most importantly, there are many great colleges and universities and if the student does not attend one there will be many others instead.Let me end, however, with a description of one of my heroes in admission. She read applications for over 20 years and having watched her do this I can vouch for the fact that she gave every single student a close read. It did not matter the numbers the student presented. She felt this was only fair. She spent untold extra hours doing this. She had virtually no life except for her reading during many months. She has now retired but her example made me try to give more time to applicants who otherwise would have been signed off on perhaps a bit too quickly on my part. I can’t say in all honesty that I still did not employ some fast reads, but I tried to give anyone who was moderately in the running a fair shot. I can’t always say I got everything right, (an issue I have written about before @Parke Muth's answer to What are some confessions of a college admissions officer?), but it wasn’t for lack of effort or concern for the time, interest and work that students put into a far too stressful process.Slow ReadsStudents who have the numbers, program, scores strong recommendations, activities that predict involvement out of the classroom, get a slow read. But slow needs to be put in context. To read 650 words (the limit for the Common App prompt) does not take more than a few minutes. Some schools have supplemental essays but usually no more than one or two and these often have much shorter word limits. All told then it is unlikely that it takes more than 10 minutes to read all the words a student has submitted For those students who have spent countless hours fretting over picking a topic, brainstorming, writing draft after draft after draft, editing and getting feedback and doing final edits this may seem like a shockingly small amount of time.Think of it this way. If you read a piece by a respected journalist or academic or anyone else that is published in places like the New Yorker or some other place how much time do you spend reading it. More often than not, it does not exceed the time admission readers put in reading student essays. Admission readers are trained to read and many have a background that prepares them for distinguishing quickly between good and bad writing. The cliché of choice in admission is that reading applications is an art, and this is somewhat accurate, but there should also be some science too. Applicants who write about research using details should know that readers have some familiarity with the kinds of things that student are doing. Some of these things are more impressive that what undergraduate students are doing and some kind of knowledge about the world that is being described in words is useful. Readers then get educated at least to be good generalists. They see thousands of essays if they have worked for a few years and they see that many fall into genres. It gets easier to pick those who come near the top of genres--for example, the "I have overcome much" essay or "I am poetic and creative" essay or "I have started my own business" essay etc. I always found it fun to try to fight for students who were as they say on the cusp. Those students who might not have quite the same numbers as others but had a voice that I was sure would add to the class.My belief in and comments on an essay's strengths that went to the rest of the committee did not always mean these students got in; my heart was broken sometimes when others did not agree with me, but I cannot say I have the ‘truth’ when it comes to knowing all things about students or essays. As I have written a great deal about essays on Quora and my blog I won’t go further into the mechanics of what makes a great essay here. Instead, I will end with this piece of advice.If you have put a great deal of effort into your essays, then the experience itself will transcend whether you get into a certain school or even if a person read your essay quickly or slowly. Learning how to write is a skill that will help you once you are at your college or university and well beyond that too. Even if the essay is not a huge factor in many admission decisions, the skills you will have will follow you wherever you go. Best of luck.