The End of the College Essay
An essay.
Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we’d have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC.
And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign to compose their own
essays, said exegetic masterpieces usually take them all of half an hour
at 4 a.m. to write, and consist accordingly of “arguments” that are at
best tangentially related to the coursework, font-manipulated to meet the minimum required page-count. Oh, “attitudes about cultures have changed over time”? I’m so glad you let me know.
Nobody hates writing papers as much as college instructors hate grading papers (and no, having a robot do it is not the answer). Students of the world: You think it wastes 45 minutes of your sexting time to pluck out three quotes from The Sun Also Rises,
summarize the same four plot points 50 times until you hit Page 5, and
then crap out a two-sentence conclusion? It wastes 15 hours of my time
to mark up my students’ flaccid theses and non sequitur textual
“evidence,” not to mention abuse of the comma that should be punishable
by some sort of law—all so that you can take a cursory glance at the
grade and then chuck the paper forever.
What’s more, if your average college-goer does manage to read through
her professor’s comments, she will likely view them as a grievous
insult to her entire person, abject proof of how this cruel, unfeeling
instructor hates her.
That sliver of the student population that actually reads comments and
wants to discuss them? They’re kids whose papers are good to begin with,
and often obsessed with their GPAs. I guarantee you that every professor you know has given an A to a B paper
just to keep a grade-grubber off her junk. (Not talking to you, current
students! You’re all magnificent, and going to be president someday.
Please do not email me.)
When I was growing up, my mother—who, like me, was a “contingent”
professor—would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging
Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more
that sympathy dissipated: “If you hate grading papers so much,” I’d say,
“there’s an easy solution for that.” My mother, not to be trifled with
when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate),
would snap: “It’s an English class. I can’t not assign papers.”
Mom, friends, educators, students: We don’t have to assign
papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course
college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.
Most students enter college barely able to string three sentences
together—and they leave it that way, too. With protracted effort and a
rhapsodically engaged instructor, some may learn to craft a clunky but
competent essay somewhere along the way. But who cares? My fellow humanists insist
valiantly that (among other more elevated reasons) writing humanities
papers leads to the crafting of sharp argumentative skills, and thus a
lifetime of success
in a number of fields in which we have no relevant experience. But my
friends who actually work in such fields assure me that most of their
colleagues are borderline-illiterate. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s
pre-Facebook Friendster profile bragged “i don’t read” (sic), and look at him.
Of course it would be better for humanity if college in the United States actually required a semblance of adult writing competency. But I have tried everything.
I held a workshop dedicated to avoiding vague introductions (“The idea
and concept of the duality of sin and righteousness has been at the
forefront of our understanding of important concepts since the beginning
of time.”) The result was papers that started with two incoherent
sentences that had nothing to do with each other. I tried removing the
introduction and conclusion altogether, and asking for a three-paragraph
miniessay with a specific argument—what I got read like One Direction fan fiction.
I’ve graded drafts and assigned rewrites, and that helps the good students get better, but the bad students, the ones I’m trying to help,
just fail to turn in any drafts at all. Meanwhile, I come up for air
and realize that with all this extra grading, I’m making 75 cents an
hour.
I’m not calling for the end of all papers—just the end of
papers in required courses. Some students actually like writing, and let
those blessed young souls be English majors, and expound on George
Eliot and Virginia Woolf to their hearts’ content, and grow up to become
writers, huzzah. But for the common good, leave everyone else out of
it.
Instead of essays, required humanities courses (which I support, for all the reasons William Cronon, Martha Nussbaum, and Paulo Freire give) should return to old-school, hardcore exams, written and oral. You cannot
bullshit a line-ID. Nor can you get away with only having read one page
of the book when your professor is staring you down with a serious
question. And best of all, oral exams barely need grading: If you don’t
know what you’re talking about, it is immediately and readily manifest
(not to mention, it’s profoundly schadenfroh when a student has to look me in the face and admit he’s done no work).
Plus, replacing papers with rigorous, old-school, St. John’s-style tribulations also addresses an issue humanities-haters love to belabor: Paper-grading is so subjective, and paper-writing so easy to fake, that this gives the humanities their unfortunate reputation as imprecise, feelings-centered disciplines where there are “no right answers.” So let’s start requiring some right answers.
Sure, this quashes the shallow pretense of expecting undergraduates
to engage in thoughtful analysis, but they have already proven that they
will go to any lengths to avoid doing this. Call me a defeatist, but
honestly I’d be happy if a plurality of American college students could
discern even the skeletal plot of anything they were assigned.
With more exams and no papers, they’ll at least have a shot at
retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the
greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even
develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls “sympathetic
imagination”—the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that
unfolds when we’re touched by stories of people who are very much unlike
us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them.
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