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It Gets Worse
Sunday, December 9th, 2007 06:12 pmI have now read thirteen of the twenty-three essay drafts submitted. Of these, I have only found six that I was actually able to give detailed feedback and a grade to, the rest being either way under the word limit, riddled with plagiarism or so ungrammatical and badly typed that I couldn't bear to read them. Of the six I managed to grade, three of them got a "D".
It's not as though I set extremely difficult tasks. OK, one option was a bit tricky, especially for non-native speakers: "Compare Tolkien's use of language in TLOTR with either another work by Tolkien or a fantasy/SF/historical novel by another author." Only two students attempted this: one wrote a pretty good essay and the other only failed because she pasted in part of an essay she'd written in high school that she had forgotten was plagiarised. The second option, to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that expressed in any other imaginative novel or film, was a bog-standard ENG 101 question, and the final choice, to compare TLOTR with Star Wars in terms of Campbell's Hero's Journey, was an absolute give-away (though I suppose it was also an invitation to plagiarise).
So what, I wonder, is the problem? It's not as though the students aren't interested in the subject matter. I could understand getting short, sloppily written, partially plagiarised essays if I'd set a question like "Compare the use of kennings in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf." Anglo-Saxon poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, which is why I only included a short extract from Maldon and spiced it up with dramatisations of Saxon and Viking military tactics. But TLOTR is something you love or hate, and if you hate it, you don't sign up for a course on it.
Anyway, I need to take a long break before I go back to reading essays, otherwise I might write something that would hurt someone's feelings (assuming I haven't already done so). Students may irritate the hell out of me sometimes, but I don't like to actually make them cry. Oh well, the bright side is that they've saved me some time - it takes much less time to dismiss a bad essay than it does to give feedback on an acceptable one.
It's not as though I set extremely difficult tasks. OK, one option was a bit tricky, especially for non-native speakers: "Compare Tolkien's use of language in TLOTR with either another work by Tolkien or a fantasy/SF/historical novel by another author." Only two students attempted this: one wrote a pretty good essay and the other only failed because she pasted in part of an essay she'd written in high school that she had forgotten was plagiarised. The second option, to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that expressed in any other imaginative novel or film, was a bog-standard ENG 101 question, and the final choice, to compare TLOTR with Star Wars in terms of Campbell's Hero's Journey, was an absolute give-away (though I suppose it was also an invitation to plagiarise).
So what, I wonder, is the problem? It's not as though the students aren't interested in the subject matter. I could understand getting short, sloppily written, partially plagiarised essays if I'd set a question like "Compare the use of kennings in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf." Anglo-Saxon poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, which is why I only included a short extract from Maldon and spiced it up with dramatisations of Saxon and Viking military tactics. But TLOTR is something you love or hate, and if you hate it, you don't sign up for a course on it.
Anyway, I need to take a long break before I go back to reading essays, otherwise I might write something that would hurt someone's feelings (assuming I haven't already done so). Students may irritate the hell out of me sometimes, but I don't like to actually make them cry. Oh well, the bright side is that they've saved me some time - it takes much less time to dismiss a bad essay than it does to give feedback on an acceptable one.
