Panther for grading on quality, not quantity

Photo by francois, via flickr 

Luis Santana/Contributing Writer 

You read a paragraph of material for which a professor has asked you to write a five page essay. You’re stuck on page two knowing that you’ve delved into all the meaning that this reading has to offer. You’ve got three pages left to write. What do you do?

For most of us, we rely on pulling sources from other places or using extremely long quotes to pad our papers, but this shouldn’t have to be done.

Why do professors constantly assign essays of ridiculous lengths if they know there’s really not that much to write about? If they know – because I’m sure when they were students they did the same – that students will end up just padding up the essays with long quotes and overly lengthy descriptions.

I think this arcane style of essay writing breeds rigidity within the work that wouldn’t be there if the professor had just told the student to write as much as they thought was necessary to get their point across.

Imagine if your professor told you “Write until you’ve said what needs to be said about the work.” It would be helpful for the professor, as they wouldn’t have to read through so many layers of padding and it would also be helpful to the students because we wouldn’t have to go searching for obscure things to throw into our essay just to fluff it up.

Our essays would also have more meaning. I think a lot of times because of page length requirements our essays become Adam Sandler movies rather than snippets of genius and sincerity.

Of course, this must be tempered in good wisdom by the student as there is no way you will get across the meaning of a passage in a single sentence alone. I’d wager that two to three pages is a good amount of writing for most writing assignments. You could write even more if you find a certain depth in the assigned readings and you feel compelled to do so.

I also don’t believe every student is as skilled as the next one in terms of writing; to have to pad the paper becomes even more of a nightmare for them as well.

What I’d like to see is just a simplifying of a silly system. It’s about time that professors move from this age old notion that: if we assign the students a certain amount of pages, they will really think about their work. It’s not true. We don’t write up to the number of pages because we found depth, we do it because it’s simply a goal to be reached. Stop grading us on quantity and start grading on quality.

Disclaimer: To those overachievers, who enjoy writing twenty pages when five have been requested that I have offended, carry on. You are beautifully masochistic.

opinion@fiusm.com 

1 Comment on "Panther for grading on quality, not quantity"

  1. “Of course, this must be tempered in good wisdom by the student as there is no way you will get across the meaning of a passage in a single sentence alone. I’d wager that two to three pages is a good amount of writing for most writing assignments.”

    That depends on the nature of the assignment, in most cases.

    “I also don’t believe every student is as skilled as the next one in terms of writing; to have to pad the paper becomes even more of a nightmare for them as well.”

    No, every student is definitely not as skilled as the next one. However, that’s a problem with the emphasis being put on making sure students know how to write, something I don’t see a lot of from my professors here at FIU. Making students not write as much because they can’t write well to begin with seems very counter-productive.

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