Friday, June 3, 2011

Bitching #4 Academic Merit

Well I just got back two essays that I've spent about the same time on both and was pretty certain that both were around the same quality.

Apparently there is no direct relationship between the number of hours spent on specific assignments and the outcome – the marks. Two similarly identical assignments, both critical essays with a 1500 word limit about issues revolving the health care system. Both assignments required 7 literary sources, and had the same due date. Whist having spent more time on one of them, I managed to receive a lower mark on it. One of the essays was written in merely 6 hours whist the other about 10. Has academic merit backtracked to an age where it is determined only by the subjective opinions of a few people, in this case only one? In this day and age of rapid growth in communications technology, shouldn’t more and more people be involved in the evaluation of academic writing? Would it not be possible to have several people, all looking at the same piece of literature, give their own opinions about it? If a student’s honestly put in an enormous amount of effort in to their work, would it be fair for anyone when it’s just shredded into a million little pieces in the hands of an assessor who just happens to have had a bad day? I understand that the whole history behind having only a few handful of learned people in the past teaching a whole truckload of knowledge-hungry intellectuals is the only available model for academics, but we’re at an age where millions of professionals are able to gain access to limitless amounts academic work through the internet, why not make it so that everyone who bothers to spend the time to do so

9 comments:

  1. I know how it feels, spending much time on something and getting the worst, or atleast not even close to expected..sux i know..My life has been always like this..

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  2. I agree that academic writing shouldn't be graded by just one professional when we live in an age where communication is at an all time high, however what you might have forgotten to think about is the fact that who is going to pay these people for the in depth time it takes to seriously critique a piece of writing? I would rather have one dedicated grader tear a piece of my written work to pieces over three who just barely skimmed it and gave me a grade rather than an actual critiquing. After all what is the purpose of a good grade if you never learned anything from it?

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  3. Graders these days. Perhaps the grader had lost his perspective and now only seeks to eek out the rest of his duties until he gets pension.

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  4. My grades have always been very generous I feel, guess it depends on the institution

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  5. I hate professors in english, I emailed my high school professor for AP english who teaches courses at UCONN, and sent him a thesis paper on which i got a 70 on for my freshmen comp teacher. My old teacher graded it a 92. The man was a complete joke of a college professor and based grades off his judgment of the student and what he personally thought of the side of the topic.

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  6. Yeah some professors can rly seem impossible.

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  7. i have a english professor who never seems to like me and give low marks for EVERYTHING that I do. I guess your post is somewhat related to my life.

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