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GA rubric flexibility on body paragraph count

features/ga-rubric-body-paragraph-flexibility.md · Updated 2026-05-01
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Summary

Thesis-driven essays shouldn't be docked for not having exactly 3 body paragraphs

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Open questions 2 items
  1. 1 Confirm the bug: is GA actually docking points for paragraph count, or is the symptom downstream of something else? Worth testing.
  2. 2 Should this be configurable per-rubric, or hardcoded based on essay type?
Spec body Markdown
# GA rubric flexibility on body paragraph count

The Organization & Structure section of the rubric appears to dock points if the essay doesn't have exactly 3 body paragraphs. For thesis-driven essays this is wrong — a thesis-driven paper can theoretically have any number of body paragraphs.

## Problem

Reported 2026-04-30: GA seems to apply the 5-paragraph essay structure (intro + 3 body + conclusion) as a hard constraint even when grading thesis-driven essays. A thesis-driven paper is defined by argument structure, not paragraph count, so this is a category error.

If true, two things follow:

1. The GA rubric needs to know what kind of essay it's grading.
2. There should likely be different rubric variants for "5-paragraph essay" vs "thesis-driven essay" (see [features/differentiated-rubrics-by-assignment-type.md](differentiated-rubrics-by-assignment-type.md) for the broader question).

## Goals (rough)

- GA either knows the essay type or doesn't dock points on body paragraph count for non-5-paragraph essays.
- Teacher can configure (per-AssignmentType) whether body paragraph count is a graded dimension.

## Open questions

- [ ] Confirm the bug: is GA actually docking points for paragraph count, or is the symptom downstream of something else? Worth testing.
- [ ] Should this be configurable per-rubric, or hardcoded based on essay type?

## Engineering handoff

Not ready. First step: instrument the GA's rubric application to confirm the dock-point behavior on body paragraph count. Then decide whether to fix the rubric or split it (see [features/differentiated-rubrics-by-assignment-type.md](differentiated-rubrics-by-assignment-type.md)).
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