This essay probes tensions between our professional practices and the quality of our professional output in the field of international studies. We organize ourselves into academic ‘‘sects’’ that engage in selfaffirming research and then wage theological debates between academic religions. This occurs at both the level of theory and epistemology. Unfortunately, this academic sectarianism produce...

Many years of training are required to obtain a job as an academic scientist. Is this investment of time and effort worthwhile? My answer is a resounding "yes." Academic scientists enjoy tremendous freedom in choosing their research and career path, experience unusual camaraderie in their lab, school, and international community, and can contribute to and enjoy being part of this historical era...

While several methods for automatic essay scoring (AES) for the English language have been proposed, systems for other languages are unusual. To this end, we propose in this paper a multi-aspect AES system for Brazilian Portuguese which we apply to a collection of essays, which human experts evaluated according to the five aspects defined by the Brazilian Government for the National High School...

It is common that students peer-review other students’ writing, and these reviews are useful information to instructors, both on the particulars of the essay being reviewed, the feedback provided and the overall progress of the class. This paper describes a novel approach to summarising feedback in academic essay writing. We present a summarisation method for identifying and extracting represen...

Directions: Imagine that you are teaching a class in academic writing for first-year college students. In your class, drafts are not graded. Instead, you give students feedback and allow them to revise their essays before submitting them for grades. In response to your first essay assignment (given below), you have received the following draft from Madeleine X., one of your students. Write a br...

This essay offers a critique of disciplinary philosophy, the dominant form of academic philosophy in the United States and elsewhere across the twentieth century. It argues that disciplinary philosophy represents an aberration compared to the main tradition of two thousand years of Western philosophy. It describes the characteristics of a dedisciplined philosophy, and emphasizes that dediscipli...

A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the assessment of essays: our approach uses genre, cue phrases and a set of patterns. Cue phrases, with their associated semantics, are used in conjunction with patterns to identify categories of argumentation p...

This paper reports on the assessment procedure of students’ academic essays at an undergraduate course in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) a business-oriented university during school year 2020/21. Following social constructivism paradigm (e.g. Vygotsky, 1962), employed peer (PA) and teacher (TA) was aimed improving their essay writing performance. The further degree correspondence between g...