Sunday, January 22, 2012

Would you rather? (Snowflake grading edition)

Would you rather:

Mark a paper that bears an astonishing, though inadvertent, stylistic resemblance to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? (Once upon a time there was a moo cow coming down the road and...3/4 of a page later, it's still the same run on-sentence.)

or

Mark a paper written by an exceptionally bright girl who expends almost all of her time and energy making herself look and sound like the love child of Kim Kardashian and Snooki? (Who is smart enough to know if she does all of the analysis but only part of the assignment, she disqualifies herself from an A.)

or

Mark a paper where every lower-case "i" is replaced by a colon?  ( Trust me, that sh:t gets old, qu:ckly.)

or

Mark yet another paper written exclusively in the passive voice?  (Yeah, I'm not even going to go there.)

or

Mark yet another paper that references the "various positive and negative" effects of hamster fur weaving?  (To the high school teachers who didn't nip that shit in the bud, I Johnny Cash salute you.)

or


Mark yet another paper that you are not even sure was submitted for your course, because it bears NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE MOTHERFUCKING INSTRUCTIONS? 

or

Go all Gloucester-in-Lear-Act III-Scene vii - with a mechanical pencil?

Discuss.  Or one-up.  Whatever.  Just...don't leave me alone out here.  (I'm cold, and there are wolves after me.)






15 comments:

  1. That third one smells like an attempt to get past plagiarism detection software to me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely, though you can't rule out a find-and-replace accident until you've done some digging. I once got a paper in which one consonant was missing from the entire text, except where spellcheck had put it.... sometimes the technology gets the better of them

      Delete
  2. I'd grade them all, then find out where their parents live and mail pipe bombs to their houses.

    Excuse me, I need to go out dynamite fishing...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (BTW, that ad on the side with the grey-bearded old man?

      That's motherfuckin' TOM JONES.

      Sweet Soviet Christ has he aged....)

      Delete
    2. @Strel: Girls started throwing their panties at Tom in 1968. That was over 43 years ago. What did you think was going to happen? Tom could stand to lose the beard, but even so, it beats the alternative. If Janis Joplin were alive today, she'd be dead by now.

      Besides, I can top that. My girlfriend and I recently found ourselves watching the Lawrence Welk Show. OK, so guest star Henry Mancini was who attracted our attention, since they were playing the theme from "The Pink Panther." It was still the band with the big "Geritol" sign over it.

      Delete
    3. I thought he was dipped in some sort of shellac like George Hamilton, so he was permanently 40-something...

      Delete
  3. I did not think the Soviets believed in Christ....

    I'd take the cute little colon for i's kid. Annoying, YES, but less so than the others. And I'd take off five points for the colon's for i's, too.

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  4. If you're going to use Johnny Cash for evil, he should be flipping off the College Board, too. High school students write like that because f**king AP tests demand it.

    And smart girls pretending to be dumb because they can't find a way to reconcile their intelligence with their social aspirations? I'm surprised when I see that in tenth graders.

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  5. The one which bears no resemblance to the assignment would at least be quick. "This does not answer the assignment. F." Moving on. :)

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  6. I would choose the paper which was written in the passive voice. The use of passive voice is the way all scientific papers are written.

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    Replies
    1. The passive voice is avoided in many journals: http://allendowney.com/essays/passive.html

      Delete
  7. Just as my students do when offered choices, I will avoid any and all of those choices, and come up with my own answer: DRINK HEAVILY!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm in this camp. Given the options--if I am given options--I'd rather drink.

      As marking essays isn't optional in my little corner of the Writing for Small Rodents world, I mark them all--as I know you do, too, DIAMC.

      Delete
  8. I kinda love that you tagged this "absinthe."

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