Frequently Asked Questions

You can submit your portfolio up to one term early (i.e. in your fifth term). To do this, contact George Cusack, the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), and he’ll add you to the Moodle site.

As a general rule, though, we don’t recommend that students submit their portfolios early if they don’t have to. Ideally, your writing will improve as you progress at Carleton, so submitting early potentially prevents you from including your strongest work. Furthermore, for most students there’s nothing to be gained from an early submission. You won’t even necessarily receive your score any earlier, since portfolios that come in during winter term generally aren’t scored until the summer, alongside the portfolios that come in during spring term.

One significant exception to this is students who are off-cycle. If you’ve taken a term of leave in your first two years, but plan to file for early graduation and graduate with your original class, then we recommend you submit your portfolio in your fifth term (i.e. the term it would be due if you hadn’t gone on leave). This will make it easier for you to get back on cycle for graduation. This still isn’t required, and you shouldn’t turn in your portfolio early if you don’t think you’re ready, but it’s an option to consider.

Finally, we should note, that if you’re going to be on an OCS program in your sixth term, you’re actually required to submit your portfolio a term early. In this case, you’ll probably be added to the portfolio site automatically at the beginning of your fifth term, but if you don’t see the site in your Moodle feed by around week 3 of that term, you should contact George Cusack, the WAC director, since students occasionally fall through the cracks between the OCS office and the WAC office.

Yes, you should take your name off the individual pieces in your portfolio.

We anonymize all portfolios as much as possible on our end: Your name will not appear on the cover sheet or anywhere in the interface that readers will use to read and score your portfolio. However, we can’t edit any of your content, so if your name appears on any of the files you upload to Moodle, they will also appear in your portfolio.

If it’s important to you that your portfolio is scored anonymously, then you’ll want to go through all of the pieces you intend to upload and remove your name wherever it appears.

For pieces where you are the sole author, you can simply delete the name or cover it over with a black box (the latter option is more work, but feels kind of cool–like you’re handling a classified document in a political thriller).

For collaboratively written pieces, please replace each author’s name with “Collaborator 1,” “Collaborator 2,” etc. This will let the readers know how many people contributed to that piece while still maintaining everyone’s anonymity.

We won’t hold back your portfolio if you don’t anonymize the pieces in it, though. If you don’t take your name off the pieces you submit, then they’ll go to readers as they are. This will not directly affect your portfolio score one way or another.

We’re sorry to see you go, but no, you probably don’t need to submit a writing portfolio. 

If your new school doesn’t work out and you decide to return to Carleton down the line, you will need to submit a portfolio before you enroll in any further Carleton classes. 

However, if you’re fairly certain that you won’t be back, you don’t have much to gain by submitting the portfolio now.  Other than the enrollment hold, there is no penalty for not submitting your portfolio–you’ll still receive credit for the classes you take this term, and the lack of a portfolio score won’t appear on the academic transcripts that you forward to your new school.

Yes, you should.  If you don’t submit your portfolio by the deadline, you will receive a hold on your enrollment, which means you won’t be able to enroll in Carleton classes when you return.  However, if you turn in the portfolio now, you’ll be free to enroll after your gap, even if you receive a score of “Needs Work” on the portfolio.

Carleton faculty and staff (and very occasionally scholars outside of Carleton) use the portfolios to study different aspects of students writing and the ways it has changed over the years. Sometimes this research is for purely internal reasons–for example, we might look at the portfolios to study the ways Carleton students understand how a thesis-driven essay works, so we can create resources to help faculty teach this skill. Occasionally, though, the results of this research may be used in conference presentations or published in academic journals.

If you give us permission to use your portfolio for research, it might be used in one or more of these research projects. If you deny permission, then it will never be used this way.

Even if you give us your permission, though, the research will always be anonymous– we will never personally identify any student.

If you don’t submit your portfolio on time, you’ll receive a hold on your enrollment, meaning you can’t enroll in courses until the portfolio is in. Additionally, the Academic Standing Committee will reach out to students who haven’t submitted their portfolios by the end of the term in which it they were due, and they may choose to place such students under formal academic review.

This is as ironclad a deadline as you’ll find at Carleton: the only exceptions will be cases where something on the college’s end (i.e. some kind of technically problem with the portfolios submission site) is the cause of the delay. We understand that Friday of Week 7 is often a busy time for students, and the portfolio can seem like a burden–this is why we strongly encourage students to complete their portfolios early! However, we do not grant extensions or exemptions for students facing major academic deadlines, significant stress, or mental health issues.

Portfolios are scored by faculty over the course of the summer, and we release the scores to all students at the same time; this usually happens towards the end of August. You’ll receive an automated email from George Cusack informing you of your score.

If you do not receive a score by September 7 in any given year, you should reach out to George Cusack, particularly if you know your peers have received their scores.

Yes, collaboratively written essays are acceptable.

If at all possible, you should mention in your reflective essay what parts of the collaborative piece most reflect your contribution to the group. However, that isn’t always possible, and the essay is still acceptable if you can’t do this.

You should also keep in mind that readers really want to get a solid sense of your writing ability, so it’s not wise to submit more than one collaboratively-written essay in your portfolio, or to have a collaboratively-written piece be the only one that fulfills the Thesis-Driven Argument or Use of Sources requirements.

Yes, but be sure to fulfill all the requirements of the portfolio in your papers that are in English. We can’t guarantee that we’ll have a faculty portfolio reader available to read papers in any other language (though we’ll do our best).

Unfortunately, portfolios need to be finalized before the end of the term so we can download and print them in time for the faculty reading session. This means that there’s no practical way to include essays that come in after week 7 of the term you submit your portfolio.

No. (See the other question about the length guidelines below.)

Yes! Please do! If you try to write a reflective essay without referring to yourself in the first person, you’ll probably sound like you’ve just had a psychotic break.

Generally speaking, yes. All of the work you submit must come from Carleton classes–pieces you write for extra-curricular purposes (e.g. an article in The Carltonian) don’t count. There are two significant exceptions to this, though:

1. You may include work completed while on off-campus studies, since these technically count as Carleton courses.
2. If you’re a transfer student, you can include work from your previous institution.

If you wrote the paper during the current academic year, yes. If you need an older assignment and/or paper, you’ll need to work with someone who has access to the Moodle Archive for that course. Contact the instructor of the course or Carleton’s Academic Technologists for help.

Yes, please do! Readers like to see that you care enough about your work to revise it.

That said, we don’t recommend using AI tools (e.g. Grammarly, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) significantly when you revise your work for the portfolio. These tools can be helpful for finding some surface-level writing errors, but if you use them to substantially alter the content or even the writing style of your work, then it doesn’t clearly represent your writing abilities any more. That may seem like a good thing if you’re insecure about your writing, but it essentially defeats the whole purpose of the portfolios, which is to get students extra assistance if there are gaps in their writing skills.

Furthermore, work that was written or heavily revised by AI has a fairly distinctive style, which tends to be dull and off-putting to readers. It may seem more polished than work you could write by yourself, but it’s likely to alienate your readers rather than impress them.

The 10-30 pages is really a guideline, not a strict requirement.  If your portfolio is shorter than 10 pages, (with the exceptions below taken into account), then it’s unlikely to pass, and if it’s longer than 30 pages, it’s unlikely to be read closely by readers, the material especially towards the end.  However, we don’t count pages and turn back portfolios for length alone.

Also, the 10-30 page guidelines assume double-spaced, 12-point font, and they do not include title pages, bibliographies, charts, graphs, footnotes/endnotes, or the reflective essay.

All portfolios are submitted through Moodle.

Please be sure to upload or enter the following:

• Your reflective essay
• Your papers and the assignments you were responding to. If you do not have the assignment write what you remember about it.
• Your portfolio metadata in the portfolio summary questionnaire.
• Complete the checklist
• Click the submit button.
• You will know that your submission was successful when you receive an email with the badge Writing Portfolio Completion.

For most students, portfolios are due on the Friday of week seven in your 6th term at Carleton.

For non-transfer students who haven’t taken academic leave, that generally means it will be due in the spring term of your sophomore year. There are three important exceptions, though:

1. Students who will be on an OCS program during their 6th term will need to submit their portfolio a term early (e.g. winter of their sophomore year for on-cycle students).
2. If you transferred to Carleton as sophomore, you’ll need to submit their portfolios at the end of your third term (or your second term, if you’ll be on OCS in your third term). Essentially, you’ll follow the same deadline you would if you’d started your first year of college at Carleton.
3. Students who transfer into Carleton as juniors are technically required to submit their portfolio in the 7th week of their first term at Carleton. If this presents significant problems, though, junior transfers can petition to submit the portfolio one term later by contacting George Cusack.