Consistency?

Soon the students that I am a teaching assistant for will have to submit a ten page term paper on 'anything sociological'. I personally feel like this is a very broad guideline (not to mention a pretty long paper for first year students) so it's not surprising that they have no idea what they're doing.

The prof I am working for has photocopied one student's essay (note to self: never hand a paper in early) and distributed it to the four TA's for us all to grade. We are meeting this morning to discuss the paper and how it should be graded. I gave it a 62%.

The student wrote all about the changes in the Canadian immigration policy over time. Where is the sociology in that? The only thing that was sociological was the statement that the policy used to be racist and now isn't. That's bad bad bad, I think. I'm looking forward to seeing what grades everyone else gave this poor sod. Yes, I said sod. I wouldn't be surprised if we all gave vastly different grades.

It's funny, because I'm generally used to reading good writing, or at least properly edited writing, and now I will have to read shitty, misspelled, poorly thought out writing. And a lot of it. I'm guessing I'll have about 40 - 50 papers to read and grade. I can't concentrate on this stuff.

As a student you think that the person who grades your work knows something about what they're doing. But no, they probably really don't. Ha ha.