Tell Me What You Want

I feel like, throughout a good portion of my education, this plea has been my internal mantra with every professor and teacher I've ever had. I want to impress them, I want to please them, I want them to want to read my work. But I don't ever know what they want from me.

Sometimes it feels like the grade on a given paper is completely arbitrary. A professor returns an assignment with a B and a list of issues that could be fixed (if you are lucky enough to receive legible commentary). With the guidance offered by these comments in mind, you head towards the next paper and, thinking you have addressed the issues outlined from your last assignment, and find that the next project gets a lower grade than the previous.

I speak here from experience. In my previous first year seminar, it seemed like every grade was unpredictable and incomprehensible. Several students received As on one paper and then Cs on the next, and even when our final term paper was due, the class seemed thoroughly unable to anticipate how their current paper would stand up to the work they had done all semester.

In the very beginning, I suppose this kind of made sense. The professor was clear about the fact that the first assignment would be graded easier than the others to allow him to assess the skill level of the class, and so it makes sense that the next couple of papers would have lower grades. But I watched as students bounced from Bs to As to Cs on papers throughout the semester.

I think the confusion came in large part for the commentary the professor gave on each assignment. On the first paper, my professor commented that my paper lacked development and depth, and I got a B on it. In the next paper, I tried to go more in depth and instead I saw my grade drop to a B-. As a matter of fact, the best grade I got on a paper in the class (excluding the final term paper), I got on a paper that was about as simplistic and simply organized I have ever written.

It wasn’t only my work facing inconsistent commentary, either. I had a classmate who was consistently receiving Bs and As on nearly every paper throughout the semester who received a C on the final term paper.

It seemed like the commentary on one paper was very often the opposite of what the next paper would be assessed on. What it seemed to me was that the most important part of professor commentary, the ability to make the priorities and goals that the professor had for our writing clear, was lacking. It took far too long to figure out the winning formula on our own.