Winter 2004, CSE 403 - Software Engineering

Reflective essays

Every week or so you will have a reflective essay assignment. The goals of these essays are (a) to get you to think more deeply about some aspect of the course, and (b) to practice the skill of reflecting. Reflecting upon your experience will deepen your understanding of the topic, show it in different light, and help you generate new ideas and possibilities. Practicing reflection is important, since this is a critical skill for becoming proficient or an expert. Only by reflecting upon what happened can you learn from our successes and our mistakes so that the mistakes you do make are more and more interesting. That is a sign of being on the path toward expertise.

Here are some techniques that will help you get the most from your reflections:

• Write in the first person about what happened to you, not some abstract person.
• Write about things that are meaningful to you or happened to you. You'll have more energy for digging into those topics.
• Consider the following four questions as you reflect upon your experience:
  • What stood out for you?
  • How was this experience for you?
  • What insights did it give you?
  • What is one thing you will do differently?
• Write clearly so that the reader can understand what you are trying to communicate.
• Use facts to ground your assertions.
• Do not confuse opinions with facts.

We are looking for stories about things meaningful to you, to be communicated in a way that they are meaningful to the reader. The goal of these essays is for you to reflect upon, capture, and synthesize what you have learned from this course, in a way that communicates this to the reader (the instructors). Good essays have solid content, clear style, are grounded in factual assertions, and communicate well.

Good code, by the way, has exactly the same characteristics as good essays. It communicates well to the people reading the code. Excellent software developers tend to also be excellent writers. In the end, writing code and writing essays are both about communicating effectively.

Our grading will reward essays that:

• Demonstrate how lessons from the course enabled you to do something that you were not able to do beforehand. This can include noticing things that you had not noticed before.
• Illustrate how this course is (or is not) changing your stories / beliefs / ideas of what is, or is not, possible for you.
• Discuss how you have used lessons from this course in other parts of your life, or vice versa.
• Analyze things using tools learned in this course, and discuss how well those tools worked for you.
• Discuss a situation from different perspectives. 
• Are beautifully written.

The grading metric is a mix of subjective and objective:

• 0 = not turned in
• 1 = below expectations
• 2 = met expectations
• 3 = surpassed expectations

Here is an example of what we consider to be a good reflective essay:

• Douglas Hofstadter