Wise Counsel From a Lecture Course Grader
Dear Undergrads,
As the poor soul who has been grading for this class for two semesters, suffering through countless horrifying exam answers and weak-ass essays, I have decided to share some useful exam tips with you all.
- WRITE LEGIBLY. If I cannot read your writing I obviously cannot understand your answer, which means I cannot determine if your answer is correct or not, which in turn means I cannot give you points.
- WRITE COMPLETE SENTENCES. You are adults. You are in college. You can legally vote. You can legally purchase cigarettes with which to kill yourselves and porn to ruin any chance of having a realistic and mutually pleasurable sex life. If you can do all of these things, then you can also write complete freakin sentences on your exams.
- ANSWER THE QUESTIONS ASKED OF YOU. I think it’s great if you know lots of information about what Jean Jacques Rousseau liked to eat for breakfast, but unless you are specifically asked to relay that information, it is useless. Listen, I was an undergrad not too long ago. I know this trick. You write as much as you can on a question’s subject, hoping to keep the professor from noticing that you didn’t actually answer the question. Believe me, I have pulled that stunt plenty of times, and I did it better than any of you, and I still didn’t get points for it because IT DOESN’T WORK.
- USE YOUR BRAIN. When you are trying to answer a question about the Reformation, and you start writing about how Martin Luther King Jr. was pissed with the Catholic Church so he wrote 95 theses called “I Have a Dream,” put your pen down and take a moment to use your brain. Martin Luther King Jr. is a name that everybody who grew up in the United States should have embedded in some part of their brains. It’s a name that should evoke some memory of that week in high school when you learned about the Civil Rights Movement, , or at the very freakin least you should remember that we celebrate him once a year on MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY. You should put that pen down, stop, and think, “Hmm, I know the name Martin Luther King Jr., and I know that the Reformation occurred, like, a really long time ago and this midterm covers only stuff until the Industrial Revolution and Marxism, because that’s what it said on the study guide. If the Reformation happened, like, a really long time ago, then Martin Luther King Jr. probably had nothing to do with it since he’s only from a long time ago, not a really long time ago. I must be confusing Martin Luther King Jr. with someone who has a similar name.” Unfortunately, what so many of you did was NOT put your pens down and use your brain, but instead, you continued to write about Martin Luther King Jr. instigating the Reformation 412 years before he was born. Use your brain.
- GIVE AT LEAST ONE FUCK. Out of the entire class only three of you turned in exams that received passing grades. THREE. Everyone else got Ds and Fs. Look around the room right now. This is a room of failures. And this is not because the class is hard or the professor doesn’t make sense or Grandma died or your dog ate your homework and then pissed all over your textbook. No. You failed because you don’t care. I know that most of you give zero fucks about U.S. history. Your apathy is deplorable. But we are entering an era in American history when apathy will very quickly become this country’s downfall. It has already begun, as was made crystal clear by the results of the election. If you people don’t open your eyes and start paying attention to things that are more important than your own lives you’re going to wake up one day and you won’t have any civil liberties left. You won’t be able to dick around online during class because Trump will have bought the Internet and turned it into a giant cyber shrine to himself. It is exponentially easier to strip people of their freedoms when they are lulled into complacency by their own pathetic apathy and ignorance, and right now you all might as well be wearing signs on your chests that read, “Lock me up in an interment camp, I give zero fucks.” So please, if not for the nation’s sake, then for your own, give at least one fuck.
Sincerely,
Your anonymous grader
Reading recommendation: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov