Requirements (Winter 2025 onward)

Basic Requirements:

1. A complete writing portfolio will contain no fewer than 3 or more than 5 pieces of writing from your Carleton courses. (Transfer students may also include pieces written at their previous schools, as long as they received Carleton credit for the classes those pieces came from.)
2. The pieces in your portfolio must come from at least three different departments or programs,
3. You may not submit more than one paper from a single class.
4. At least one piece in your portfolio must present a thesis-driven argument. Please note that a piece doesn’t need to be traditional, humanities-style essay in order to qualify as thesis-driven. Pieces written in any academic discipline (lab reports, statistical analyses, literature reviews, etc.) can count as thesis-driven arguments, as long as they contain a clearly-stated set of central claims that summarize your argument or conclusions for that piece.
5. At least one piece in your portfolio must effectively use multiple sources. In this case “effectively using sources” implies making conclusions about the sources individually, making insightful connections between them, clearly indicating where the ideas from your sources end and your own ideas begin (and vise versa), and documenting sources clearly with a formal citation system (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.).
6. Your portfolio must include a brief (~750–1200 words) reflective essay, in which you examine how you have developed as a writer through your college courses to date. The reflective essay does not directly affect your portfolio score, nor does it count as one of your 3-5 essays from Carleton courses, but it does give your readers important context about the other pieces in your portfolio and why you chose to include them. The full prompt for the reflective essay is here, along with some tips for how to approach writing it.
7. You must meet all of the above requirements (including having pieces from three departments) with work written in English. You may, however, include a 4th or 5th piece in a non-English language, if you wish. See “Non-English writing” below for more details.

Scoring Criteria

Your portfolio will be assessed on five criteria, which represent the basic set of writing skills the college expects all graduates to develop with proficiency:

• Audience and Purpose: The ability to fulfill the goals follow the appropriate conventions for each assignment
• Argumentation: The ability to present an effective academic argument, summarized by a clear thesis or central set of claims 
• Sources and Evidence: The ability to support claims with appropriate evidence and draw effectively on multiple outside sources
• Organization: The ability to organize and present ideas in a clear and logical manner
• Grammar and Mechanics: The ability to write clearly and follow appropriate rules for grammar and documentation of sources   

In order to pass, your portfolio as a whole must satisfy each of these criteria. However, this does not mean that each individual piece in the portfolio must satisfy all five criteria.

Additionally, students will receive feedback on Reflection, defined as the ability to connect details from your work to a clear narrative of your experiences, abilities, and goals as a writer. This feedback will be based primarily on your reflective essay, but it will not affect your overall portfolio score.

Choosing Pieces for the Portfolio

It’s important to note that the pieces in your portfolio do not need to be “traditional” academic essays, i.e. the kind you might expect to write in a humanities course. Lab reports, literature reviews, short reading responses, proofs, and many other types of writing can be included in the portfolio. In fact, we strongly encourage students to submit a variety of writing from a diverse set of disciplines, to demonstrate the breadth of their writing abilities. There are a few limitations to keep in mind, though:

Creative writing is absolutely welcome in the portfolio, but cannot count towards the use of sources or thesis-driven essay requirement. We therefore recommend that students submit at least three non-creative pieces, to ensure readers have a sufficient sample of their academic writing skills.

Collaboratively-written pieces are also welcome in the portfolio, but again we recommend that students submit at least 2-3 pieces written exclusively by them, so that readers can get a clear understanding of their writing skills. If you do submit a collaborative piece, you might want to take a sentence or two in your reflective essay to address how you personally contributed to that piece.

Multimedia pieces, unfortunately, cannot be included in the portfolio, due to the limits of the technology involved in submitting and scoring the portfolio. You may, however, include images, charts, graphs, and other visualizations (essentially anything that can be formatted in a standard pdf) in your portfolio.

Non-English Writing

We welcome writing in all languages taught at Carleton, and will do our best to ensure that our pool of portfolio readers includes faculty or staff who are fluent in each language taught at Carleton. However, the pool of readers changes from year-to-year, and we can’t always guarantee complete coverage. Thus, every student is required to meet all of the portfolio requirements with writing in English.

In practice, however, we’re generally able to find fluent readers for all non-English pieces, and those readers will consider your non-English writing as a fully equal part of your portfolio.

Length Guidelines

Your portfolio should contain about 10-30 total pages of writing, not including charts, graphs, images, bibliographies, title pages, or the reflective essay.

This is really a guideline, not a hard restriction, and your portfolio will not be rejected or fail to pass based on the length alone. However, any portfolio that contains fewer than 10 pages of writing is unlikely to pass, as readers simply won’t have a large enough sample to assess your writing skills. Portfolios over 30 pages are not necessarily less likely to pass, but readers will likely pay less attention to the individual pieces in longer portfolios, which may cause them to overlook some of the stronger details in your writing, especially in the later pieces.

Submitting Your Portfolio

All of your portfolio materials will be submitted to a dedicated Moodle site, which you should receive access to at the beginning of the term your portfolio is due. If you do not see the portfolio site in your Moodle login page by week 4 of the term in which you believe your portfolio is due, please contact George Cusack (gcusackATcarleton.edu).