I'm a TA for engineering students at a large university. I'm gonna keep the details vague for privacy, etc. But one of my classes this semester has an essay component.
I'm a TA for engineering students at a large university. I'm gonna keep the details vague for privacy, etc. But one of my classes this semester has an essay component. I've TA'd for it before and lamented my fellow engineers poor writing skills and the overly forgiving rubric, so I was pleasantly surprised when a lot of the papers were pretty good this time around. There's even a required AI usage statement, and Canvas has a plagiarism checker so I felt more secure that this was the actual student's work. Then I got to one student who had a strong introductory paragraph and then just... bullet points. Pages of bullet points. Or sometimes "paragraphs" that were really just a sentence or two. Listing off elements. At first I thought this was some kind of unfinished outline the student had submitted because they didn't finish the assignment. But no, interspersed are actual paragraphs. Including a conclusion. They have citations (though weirdly their APA bibliography is a numbered list, rather than hanging indents. The citations are otherwise correctly formatted), they clearly can write and clearly have an analysis of the topic. But for some reason they chose to write bullet points. And they even left out some major elements of the assignment. So I had to fail them. Not just a bad grade (I've issued plenty of C's), but an F. I'm baffled. I took this class when I was in undergraduate. I completely understand students being busy or procrastinating or not prioritizing the class (even if I think it's important, I recognize it's a 1 credit course seniors are required to take). I'm actually a bit late on grading this myself. I know that lots of engineering students suck at writing essays, and can barely write memos and lab reports. But this paper it's just.... bizarre. And it seems so intentional, not at all like an unfinished outline. The paper only has to be 1500 words; they hit and exceeded that with bullet points. Their points are often complete sentences; if they combined the points into a paragraph and added the barest connective tissue it would work just fine, and they'd have a middling paper brought down primarily by them just missing one of the required elements (and, unfortunately, many of their peers submitted papers like that). I really can't understand how someone got this far through school without being able to make a decent paper. I cannot stress how much this seems to be a finished product in their eyes, not an unfinished paper sent at the last minute; they submitted it with over 6 hours left in the day! If they'd somehow never had to write an actual paper, the class has a "this is how you write an essay" document which they go over in the lectures. Is this common??? Are some students really just incapable of writing a paper and still able to succeed? I'm baffled. submitted by /u/Linguini8319 [link] [comments]