So...I've found a thread full of college professors discussing the essay I discussed in the previous article, and...a lot of them kinda miss the point IMO.
Like, they argue from the perspective that the essay was based on pseudoscience and the Bible was not an authoritative source. I'd be inclined to agree, but again, the reason I had the view I did is because of the criteria of the assignment. It seemed to me that the point of this assignment was to read the material and show you understood it by engaging in it in some way. The form of engagement was left open, and some cited examples were based on personal opinion.
The assignment was judged not on the strength of the student's arguments, or their objective correctness, it was merely being graded on whether the reaction was clearly written, tied into the article, and offered "thoughtful reflection or response." In other words, interact with the material at hand, show some level of thought. By those standards, the essay was adequate. I mean, it was kinda cringe inducing, and I know some people compared it to like, RFK thinking tylenol causes autism and no matter how well argued it is, it made some fundamentally incorrect assumptions that can't be defended, but that's the thing. Refuting this student is well beyond this assignment, as it means having a philosophical and metaphysical discussion with them and undoing a lifetime of indoctrination. Some argued that this student shouldn't be in psychology. Well...I actually could agree with that in theory. As I've cited before, the fundamentalist christian perspective is at odds with the discipline of psychology. And quite frankly, I wouldn't want to be treated by a psychologist who is a fundamentalist christian (although...maybe a market for such a thing does exist, after all, some might find it useful to have access to psychologists who are "in the faith" and aren't openly hostile to it). So...idk.
Honestly, I blame the professor for not being more specific regarding their requirements for the assignment. If you want academic rigor and citing academic sources, specify that. But dont just assign something on a controversial subject, leave the discussion open ended, and then get mad when you get a religious soapbox arguing for traditional gender roles. Again, it just comes off like the professor wanted to impose a certain perspective on the students, and got pissed off when someone with a completely different perspective told the professor exactly what she thought. I'm sorry, the professor walked into a rake on that one.
My actual personal opinion on the student's work is that she is a whack case with whack case opinions. But as a former whack case myself who, after years of exposure to academia, eventually left my whack case opinions BECAUSE of the intellectual development I went through in academia, eh...I can't help but feel sympathy for the student.
Again, if the professor wanted more academic responses, she should have made the assignment less casual, specifying that in the grading rubric. I know my own experiences with assignments like this normally specified that I used at least 2-3 sources and then used MLA/APA format in citing them blah blah blah. Nope. Their fault for making the assignment so casual. Again, I interpret this assignment as "prove to me you read the assignment and understand it by interacting with the material in some way, how you do so is up to you." By those standards, that student did nothing wrong, even if it was a cringe essay.
And I wanna make it clear. Her opinions ARE cringe. I dont like the idea of someone citing the bible as evidence either. But properly understood, the problem here is a lifetime of religious indoctrination. You cant just break a student out of that with one assignment, in one class, in one semester. It takes YEARS to leave that crap. Trust me, I would know. I've done it. So...for all the people saying she shouldnt go to college, I can see the argument there, but...if you dont let her to go college, she'll NEVER find her way out of that. And if she doesnt go to a secular college, she'll go to a religious one like Liberty or something where yeah...they just reinforce that nutjobbery.
Again, at least she interacted with the material according to the parameters of the assignment. If the professor wanted a more rigorous response, they should've specified more rigorous requirements.
And even if the reasoning used in the essay was flawed....well....dont give her a zero.
Again, it was a 25 point assignment. 10 points was on the response being related to the assigned reading material. 10 points was whether the essay was a thoughtful response, rather than a regurgitation. If you didnt like the response, here is where you point that out. And even then, if you take points off for the bible references, lack of academic rigor, she still deserves SOME credit. Like even if you gave her 3-4 points out of 10, that's still something. And the other 5 is whether the paper was clearly written. So...basically, did it show mastery of the english language.
So...with that said, there's no way this deserved a 0. I'd say it would be hard to give this a failing grade at all. If I was as harsh as reasonable possible, idk, I'd give it like...a C? And even then I think a B or A is fine. Maybe include some stuff about the bible not being an authoritative source and how we want ACADEMIC sources. Ya know, if you wanna be constructive (some professors in the thread I referenced were uppity and said the professor provided good instruction and the student didn't accept it...uh...no...you dont give good instruction by failing a student, that's PUNISHING them, just leave a few comments in the margins, knock a couple points off, and move on.
Again, even if I agree that the student's opinion is crap, I don't believe this deserved to get lower than a C. For reference, a C is 70-79 points, so we're talking a score of 18-19/25 here. MAYBE a D if you were REALLY harsh (to be fair i didnt pay close attention to grammatical structure or read the original article the student was assigned). But yeah. Definitely not an F and definitely not a zero.
Heck, considering how open ended it was, you could even argue it should get an A. Because again, the professor walked into a rake with how they designed the assignment. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to get at here. It was the professor's fault for making the assignment open ended. She can't get mad a student responded within the parameters given.
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