Assignment

He was pretty upset and disappointed, our lecturer. After having marked our first papers, it seemed obvious that some of the people in class are not taking this study seriously enough. The average was below a six (out of ten), and he'd been lenient not to give any mark lower than a four.

The next ten minutes were spent laying out the common mistakes. Poor citations, poor use of footnotes, poor sources (some people actually used Wikipedia)... bad and groundless arguments, irrelevant discussions of history and politics. It was an assignment discussing the law surrounding Palestine's right to self-determination and statehood, pure and simple. And if people had been paying attention in the lectures and tutorials there was really no excuse to get a poor grade. Some 'creative' person included a cartoon in the paper, which caused our lectuerer to sarcastically point out that the art faculty is down the road. Another stuck a sticker bearing the Palestinian flag on the front page.

I sat there wondering whether this is still the masters class I had enrolled myself on. I mean basic paper writing are skills taught and drilled into you since the very first day of undergrad studies. A paper must have a beginning, a middle and an end. You take (an) argument(s), discuss it, support it, compare it, contrast it, and reach your own conclusion. You use authoritive sources, cases, resolutions, academic articles, legal journals to back up your arguments. You include footnotes, references, a bibligraphy...and most important of all, you include your name in the paper. If you don't know this, how can you even be prepared to start writing a 20,000word dissertation towards the end of the year?

As a result the next assignment will be even more strict. To avoid people writing useless and irrelevant political and historical analysis, the word limit has been cut to 1200words. A bunch of us, who had finished the paper already, protested. No use, since we, the class as a whole, must learn, and there can be no exceptions. Which means I'll now have to spend more time trimming my essay, whereas I've got a mid-term test next week as well.

Not happy...