Greetings VIPEr Colleagues,

I am working on my syllabus for my fall inorganic course, with 18 students enrolled. I am teaching two labs (9 students each), which is a perfect number of students. Anyway, in the past I have had the students completed six laboratory reports (ACS format), which is a lot of grading to do. After careful reflection, I will only have the students complete two full lab reports (on 2 experiments), specifically one will be due during week 5, the other due during week 14. Doing it this way, I can give the students more time to develop their writing skills and provide them with more meaningful feedback. I have also decided to include a new writing assignment this year, namely having the students write one graphical abstract on any experiment conducted in the lab this semester. Have you asked your students to prepare a graphical abstract? I think this could be a neat exercise because we often have to prepare a graphical abstract when submitting a manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal. I welcome any feedback. Thus, instead of six writing assignments, I am now only focusing on 3 assignments for the semester.