Throughout my five years at Adelphi, I have noticed a few things. For one, the English building is falling apart. Seriously, how about we fix that place up before adding another dorm building? Second, college professors love to assign ridiculously long papers for absolutely no reason.
Why do professors feel the need to give a required page length when assigning a paper? I'm talking about your basic paper, not a Thesis. Why? Don't they realize that most of the times students will ramble about nothing for a few pages just to get to the desired page length? Why not allow a student to write an amount that they feel is appropriate and then grade them on the content of their writing, regardless of how short it is.
We are in college after all; I'm pretty sure we all are aware that we can't hand in a two page paper and call it a day. I know plenty of people that got points taken off simply because their papers weren't the "desired length", but the the professor then also commented on how well they proved their point. It just doesn't seem right to me. Especially when the class is an elective. I'm not trying to say that these classes are inferior to the classes that students actually have to take, but the professors of these classes need to understand that a student is going to be a lot more concerned with the work they have to do for the classes that are a part of their major.
I for example, just had to work on a 12 page literature review tonight for an elective that I decided to take. The professor gave us less than a week to do it. If her goal was to completely stress out her students, she did a fabulous job. It's stressful enough to have to write big papers for my education classes, why would a teacher that knows they are teaching an elective feel the need to assign such a paper to a class of Master's students?
How do you guys feel about papers with "desired page lengths"? Do you think its fair?
I hear what your saying about the length Katherine, but try to look at it through the teachers eyes. You know how students are, especially the ones who will love to write as little as possible to do the bear minimum. The teacher will eventually get a headache from telling students that their work doesn't have enough dept to it. Setting a page limit put things in perspectives for many?
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, I think it's fair. Lol.
ReplyDeletePerhaps a minimum page requirement that is a fair length would work best?
ReplyDeleteI guess I can understand why a minimum page requirement would be best. I do however, think that assigning papers longer than 10 pages is a little much.
ReplyDeleteLol, I agree with you Katherine.
ReplyDelete