Established by Dave and John Sands in 1997 to remember their mother and the importance she placed on writing well, this endowed scholarship helps to support excellence in writing at Scripps College. This award has traditionally been given to two first-year writers for academic essays written in one of their required first-semester courses. Currently, Sands award winners are chosen from among students taking Core 1. Awards take the form of a partial scholarship for the winners’ sophomore year at Scripps College. The award-winning essays are also published in the next edition of the Scripps College Journal, Scripps’ literary magazine.
Submission Procedure
Core 1 instructors will nominate up to two essays from two different students in their section. These essays should have been singled out by the instructor as excellent in terms of argument and interpretation of evidence as well as form. In the process of making their selections, instructors can ask students to revise their essays in conjunction with feedback received from Writing Center tutors, peers, and/or the instructors themselves, but instructors cannot edit the essays themselves. The deadline by which instructors must have received the final version of the student’s essay they would like to nominate is the Core 1 final submission deadline for the final essay. Instructors should let Pam Bromley (pbromley@scrippscollege.edu) know that they would like to be on the Sands Award Committee no later than the last day of exams in December.
Instructors will nominate up to two essays from their section and submit them to the Writing Program’s administrative assistant, Sheri Ripley (sripley@scrippscollege.edu), no later than three days after the end of Winter Closure in early January (this deadline is firm; instructors should consider submitting papers in December as they finalize grades). Instructors and Sheri will ensure that all identifying information is removed from the essays, and then Sheri will post the essays to a password-protected site for the members of the Sands Award Committee. The committee will meet in mid-January to make their final selections and present them to the Dean of Faculty, who notifies the winners. Students who have questions about the submission or evaluation process should contact their Core 1 instructors or the Director of the Writing Program, Kimberly Drake (kdrake@scrippscollege.edu).
Selection Criteria
The essays are judged according to the criteria for superior college writing.
All submitted essays should:
- State a thesis that makes an argument about specific elements of the text.
- Support the thesis using evidence in the form of quotes and/or paraphrases from the text, along with analysis that provides context for the evidence and demonstrates how the evidence supports the thesis of the paper.
- Accurately cite sources used, including text and lecture.
- Follow every feature of the prompt, including word count.
- Reference only Core 1 readings, lectures, and dictionary definitions, not section-specific materials.