You Know What, Uni: I Don't Like You Either.
You know, just once, just bloody once, I would like someone whose at least as smart as I am to mark my motherfucking essays, not some jumped-up pseudo-intellectual want-wit with an inbuilt facility for missing the cocking point. Seriously, over the past three years, I've consistently turned in essays that barely deserve a 'B' and got 'A's for them, and essays that thoroughly deserve 'A's and got 'B's. On one occasion, a perfectly serviceable piece of work that should have been a B at the very least came back with a motherfucking D. It's not just the feeling of being marked down mistakenly that annoys me as the feeling that the amount of work I put in has precisely fuck all to do with the grade I get back.
Think I'm overreacting? Well then, allow me to prove my point: I got an essay back today that I had slaved over for hours, even working myself beyond the point of exhaustion to complete it because I actually loved the subject... I know my own work, and it should have been an A. It got a B, and do you know why? Well, one of the criticisms that came back with it was (I kid you not) that the sentences were too long. The fucking sentences were too long? These splat-brained piss-minstrels do know I'm working in a university environment not a pre-school, right? No? Oh well, just thought I'd check. I don't mean to state the obvious, but expecting me to reduce complex geopolitical concepts and historical incidents to sub-clause-free, snappy soundbites is, frankly, kind of a dick move. I know that's the way academic journals are going nowadays, but that doesn't make it right: it's absurd, bass-ackwards and infantalising. Also: if one more fucker tells me my sentences are too long, I'm going to take the Oxford English Dictionary and give them a word enema. AAAAGGGGHHH! I could go onto list other truly fucktarded criticisms, but they're all subject-and-question-specific and would therefore mean nothing to any reader not enrolled on the exact same course as I am. But you get the point: that's the level of nitpicking stupidity I'm up against.
Of course, according to sod's law, another essay that I put hardly any effort into and which is only worthy of a 'B' will come back with an 'A'. Probably- I don't know yet, because that's another problem with my university: all the results come back on the same day (with one or two possible exceptions), there's only one work-back room and everything, therefore, should find its way to the same place. And yet the admin still manage to not have all the essays I've submitted waiting for me when I come to pick up one. There should have been three essays with my name stamped on them in big, easy-to-read letters so they could be found nice and easily when I went to that work-back room and stood in a queue for a pointless length of time. There was only the one I was just moaning about. What's more, it took them several long, tedious minutes to even establish the basic, blatant fact that they hadn't even got any of the essays for those subjects that they should have back yet. That means I'm not unreasonably expecting them to find a couple of specific essays very quickly in one large pile... all I'm asking is that they ascertain that said pile of essays exists at all in slightly less time than it takes a tortoise to, say, map the fucking G-Nome. It's not like the stacks of essays aren't arranged in a quick and readily accessible order in what is, essentially, quite a small room with no place to lose anything... and yet students still have to stand around while staff members search for essays that should be there and aren't in the hope of finding a magic stash of essays that apparently doesn't even exist because somebody higher up the administerial chain ballsed up their timing.
Again, everything I've just said might sound like an overreaction... to someone who hasn't had to endure it. It's frustrating and humiliating to have your work marked by people you could outsmart and then lost by people who a fucking flat-worm could outsmart, leaving you safe in the knowledge that the wanktankerous former polytechnic you're stuck in probably doesn't give a solitary pair of assless chaps about your academic ambitions or even the fact that you have better things to do with you day than stand in an endless queue for the one single workback room they've provided for all undergraduate students in the Humanities department.
Sigh. Sometimes the real world of work that I'm facing at the end of this year scares me, so I suppose at least I can thank my uni for that: compared to being stuck around these gumps for another year, it looks positively inviting.
