Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Welcome to MICUSP!

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) is a collection of around 830 A grade papers (roughly 2.6 million words) from a range of disciplines across four academic divisions (Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences) of the University of Michigan (U-M), Ann Arbor. MICUSP was created by a team of researchers and students at the U-M English Language Institute (ELI).

The recommended citation for MICUSP is: Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers. (2009). Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.

• Search and browse MICUSP online now!
  The MICUSP Simple search and browse interface provides free access to the full set of 829 MICUSP papers. It is designed to be simple and user-friendly and mainly targeted to EAP/ESL teachers and students. We are also working on a more advanced interface which addresses the needs of corpus researchers.

If you have questions or comments on MICUSP, please email us at micusp-help@umich.edu.

The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan (UM), who hold the copyright. The corpus has been developed by researchers at the UM English Language Institute. The corpus files are freely available for study, research and teaching. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. For further information about copyright permissions, please contact Dr. Ute Römer at elicorpora@umich.edu.

• MICUSP Simple Tutorials

  These tutorials show you how to use MICUSP Simple and how to browse for and search in MICUSP papers.

• About MICUSP

  A short history of this project.

• MICUSP Research Goals

  What research areas can MICUSP-based studies contribute to?

• MICUSP Paper Classification

  Read about what types of academic student papers are included in MICUSP and how we labeled them.

• Using MICUSP in EAP Teaching

  Why and how can MICUSP be a useful tool in teaching EAP writing?

• MICUSP Kibbitzers

  These small MICUSP-based research projects provide pedagogically-relevant insights into important features of advanced student academic writing.

• MICUSP Publications and Presentations

  What have we discovered about students’ writing? Read the results of these recent studies.