A Website Evaluation: The Sacrificial Ceremony

The website I chose to evaluate based on our group's rubric is the pbs NOVA website, and specifically an article called The Sacrificial Ceremony by Liesl Clark. This article explores child sacrifice in Incan culture... Check it out! Because it is an article and is short and our project will be in a magazine format and will be longer, it will be a little difficult to evaluate using the same rubric, but I'll give it a go...

A child who was sacrificed. No caption was given within the website about who this was and where he or she was found. 

Topic Choice - worth 15%

• Score: 15% - I thought this was a fascinating topic, and it relates well to the class and to our project.

Overall Appearance - worth 25%

• Score: 20% - In the context of the pbs website it looks quite nice, however it is not as creative as it could be.  It is organized and has good headings, and I enjoy the color change in the text. The inserted "quotes"provide some added interest and emphasis of child sacrifice. The pictures are great - there are only three of them but considering the size of the article, I felt like three good pictures mostly did it justice. I was taken aback by the pictures, to be honest, because they are a little creepy and sad. One downfall is that the first picture (shown above) has no information in the caption concerning how old that individual was and where they were found. The other two pictures had appropriate and informative captions, as shown below. 

Figurines similar to this one may have been added in with sacrificial victims in order to provide them with companionship after their death. 

Juanita, an 11-15 year old female found on Mount Ampato.

Content - worth 30%

• Score: 20% - The article contains valuable information while remaining approachable to the reader. However, it was kind of a short article and I felt that it skimmed over many topics. I would have liked to see more information. I really liked the introduction in the green text, but felt as though there was not much explanation of evidence in the body of the text. Additionally, there was no obvious conclusion. 

Quality of Sources - worth 10%

• Score: 0% or Not Applicable - No sources were cited (other than for the photos). This could be due to the fact that it is an article.... therefore I don't think it's fair to judge this category for this website. Let's go with N/A. 

Mechanics - 10%

• Score: 10% - Excellent sentence and paragraph structure. There are no spelling mistakes and the article is easy to read. 

Cooperative Work - 10%

• Score: Not applicable to this article, seeing as how only one person wrote it!

I feel as though it's most fair not to count the Quality of Sources and Cooperative Work sections of the rubric. Therefore, this website article would score 65/80, giving it an overall score of 81%.

Here are a couple questions that this article brought up for me... Any comments would be great!

How do you feel about the display of these pictures? Do you think there should be some sort of warning to give readers a heads up?