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opinion
Too
much work in final stretch
Finally, it's getting toward that last stretch of the semester,
when everything is due and you begin to try to make up for
all the time you slacked the past twelve weeks.
But it is always around this time of year when I wonder why
so many teachers decided to give their students huge projects
or ten plus page papers.
Understandably, there are some classes where it is necessary
to have projects at the end of the year. These classes are
usually of the creative sort; like art or photography where
you may need to institute the theories that you were supposed
to have learned during the semester.
Sometimes these projects and papers are just gratuitous.
A class I took required a twelve-page paper with footnotes,
a bibliography and no less than six sources. So I went to
work researching, speaking with my professor and then finally
writing and rewriting the paper.
Finally, after what seemed like 100 hours of slave labor I
turned my paper in on the Wednesday of finals where my professor
announced that if anybody wanted their papers back, the latest
they could pick them up was Friday ... of the same week.
Angry, I showed up Friday morning to pick up my paper. My
professor handed it to me and I opened it up to the back page
where he always put the grades. Right there in big red ink
it said A, but it wasn't good enough for me, so I asked him
if he actually read it.
"Sure," my professor said. "I've been reading
all my classes papers over the last few days."
My professor had four classes like mine, with at least 20
to 25 students in each class. If the minimum paper length
was twelve pages that would mean that my professor read roughly
960 to 1200 pages in about three days.
Oh and I forgot to mention that we always had a five page
take home essay and three in class essays for our final which
would mean make for around 500 more pages of reading on the
take home alone.
So I asked again if he reads all of these himself. "Yep,"
he responded, so I asked him what he thought. "Good,
good stuff, you made some great points."
I took my A's and left, but not without being extremely bitter
for putting so much time into something that I know was not
read.
I have three classes where major projects are due around the
same time. On top of that I have finals, graduation and that
pesky little detail of finding a job so I can begin the rest
of my life and I'm doing all this wondering why professors
wait until the last minute.
Would it not make sense to space it out and perhaps catch
us when we are not yet burned out, so that we could turn in
papers that are of good quality?
More importantly, in many of these classes final projects
are nothing more than an added disturbance to my well being,
especially when they are due the same day as the final or
somewhere very close. I think it would be a nice idea to have
one or the other. Both are just too much for the students
and probably the professors as well.
Alex Roman is a journalism major at Cal State Long Beach.
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