Sample Student Evaluations

SAMPLE FINAL EVALUATION #1

Instructor: Prof. M

Student: Maria D

Class: Reporting

Maria D. arrived at the Jschool without any prior experience as a reporter, but the energy and enthusiasm with which she approached her assignments more than made up for it.

She is a dogged beat reporter, who spends hours in the field making contacts and developing sources. It’s obvious to us that she is fascinated by people and what makes them tick, and that she embraces learning – all terrific qualities in a journalist.

As a writer, Maria made steady progress. Her early pieces tended to be unfocused and often sounded more academic than journalistic. But by the end of the term, she was writing succinct lively sentences that carried the reader along. Her leads, in particular, had improved significantly. Take this excerpt, which sucked us right into her profile: “In 1973, Andres Rosario volunteered to join the Army, figuring that he was going to get drafted soon anyway. His eight-year stint in the service took him to Germany, Cambodia and Vietnam, and introduced him to some companions that would stay with him for almost 20 years and take him just about as low as he could go: heroin and cocaine.”

Her understanding of the difference between topic and story also grew steadily throughout the semester. She consistently met deadlines, though we would urge her to build in a little extra time for proof-reading her copy; it was obvious to us when the clock was ticking and she was rushing, because typos and other small errors would show up in her copy. On longer deadlines, this was rarely the case.

Maria still could work on reporting her stories more fully. Sometimes, we think she’s so enthralled by what her subjects are telling her that she doesn’t think to go beyond it. She needs to remember that a journalist’s job is to think critically about what people are saying – does it make sense? How does it fit into the larger whole? – and also, always, to verify it. But that, too, is an area in which we’ve seen progress, and we’re confident that if she continues working at it, she’ll go far in this business. It’s been a pleasure having her in class this semester, and we hope she’ll stay in touch.
 

SAMPLE EVALUATION #2

Student: Kaylin XXX

Instructor: Prof. B

Class: Master’s Project

Unlike many others in her class, Kaylin knew from the start what she wanted to do for her master’s project: taxation in Ireland. It’s a big and challenging topic – and her first hurdle was choosing what aspect of it to focus on given that she had to do the reporting mainly from New York.

This hurdle turned out to be the most formidable among the many she encountered while doing this project. Only by exploring many different possibilities for the story was Kaylin able to determine which one was most promising – but that meant investing a few months of research to figure out what the story was going to be about.

Looking back, maybe the two of us should have worked harder to zero in the project’s focus earlier, because other barriers came in Kaylin’s way: a paucity of documents, the complexity of the subject matter and the lack of sources willing to talk. Like others in the class, Kaylin could have obtained primary documents and interviewed sources in the inner ring earlier, especially as she was striving to come up with new information on a subject that had been well-trodden by journalists.

Kaylin’s first draft was well written but it meandered, circling around but missing the jugular. The second draft was much better. It made clear what the thesis of the project was: Ireland’s evolution as a tax haven, but the draft also suffered from a lack of concrete examples, great quotes and a sense of the big picture. The story laid out the broad outlines of how tax deals are negotiated but readers had no sense of the companies that made these deals and the economic and other imperatives that drove the Irish government to enter into these arrangements.

Kaylin is a gifted writer, but this topic was a complex and difficult one. It didn’t lend itself easily to colorful characters and its narrative arc was a yawn-inducing one on the evolution of tax policy. Kaylin’s facility with words certainly helped, but the lack of a nut graf and contextual section early in the text hampered the reader’s ability to process the information she presented. 

The project took real shape in its final version, breaking new ground with an explanation of how tax discounts started from the 1950s with help from the Rockefeller Foundation, and how these evolved into a variety of arrangements that make Ireland what it is today  – the tax haven of choice of some of the world’s biggest and most profitable companies.

This was an ambitious project, but it came through in the end: Kaylin traced the development of Irish tax policy, made clear the arrangements that had been made, thereby shedding light on issues that have been kept in the dark for so long. While much of the material she obtained were from published or otherwise open sources, this project showed the value of digging into material that is decades old and pulling information together to explain convincingly and cogently how things came to be.