Thursday, March 30, 2006

teacher, decipherator

Today brought happy news from my history teacher, including the below note:

BTW - you are the only one to actually discuss the platform of the Populist Party. And - you have nice handwriting, too.
It made me wonder what kind of disasters teachers and professors have to wade through when grading essays.

I took law school exams on the word processor and then the laptop, but many still take them by hand. My old colleague, Mike, once related how an instructor in his Bar review suggested sloppy handwriting as a strategy to slide mediocre essays by graders who would give your unintelligible words the benefit of the doubt. For the new essay section on the SAT, graders aren't allowed to take handwriting into account (although it seems impossible to keep them from doing this, albeit inadvertently).

So I wonder how many community college essays even enter the realm of total comprehensibility.

What a pain that must be.

Worse even than writer's cramp.

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