Doing a good job on the rough draft will enable students to obtain better/more useful feedback, resulting in a higher final grade.

Grading the papers should serve two functions: It should give us a grade that reflects the adequacy of the content and quality of the research, thinking and writing that went into the paper. All four of these (content, research, thinking and writing) are important and should be taken into consideration in grading. Secondly, it should provide feedback to the students about how they have done on all four in a way that might allow them to improve. The best possible world is that the feedback and comments, if they chose to follow them, would allow them to produce a very significantly improved paper, and are generalizable enough that they will help them on other future papers. So, two goals; grading and feedback/guidance.

Content: Have they chosen a topic that is "doable" and chosen a reasonable level of generality/specificity (not too general or too nitpicky-specific) at which to tackle it? Do they present what appears to be a reasonable (and where relevant--ie. on a topic that is actively being researched, some recent) set of findings/sources? Do they present the material in a manner that is understandible? (This is a writing issue too.)

Thinking: Do they say interesting/intelligent/cogent/relevant things about the topic? Do they put things together (synthesize) or make reflective comments or reach reasonable conclusions about what they have written? (The alternative is that they just list a bunch of findings and never put it together into anything either coherent or that clearly delineates the differences that exist and perhaps can't be reconciled.

Research: Multiple sources from quality including some (a minimum of at least three, and hopefully more) from the psychological journal research literature. (Please review the paper assignment to see why this is a reasonable expectation.) The research that is mentioned in the bibliography should be used in the paper! The referencing should be reasonable- major points should be supported by referenced items, so that the reader can track down/challenge or further explore the source of some issue they care about.

Writing: Grammatical, spelling and typing errors should be minimal. That is one level of expectation. The other is that the paper should be well structured. There should be an introduction of the topic, a marshalling of evidence/argument and presentation of the major contents, and then some reasonable conclusions that derive from the content. It should "hang together" as a paper. So, in talking about the quality of the "writing" we mean both the mechanics of the language and how well structured the paper is.