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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Slop.
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Nah, this is not what professional academic feedback for a 650 word project should look like. The entirety of the feedback for a tiny piece of writing (that most of the class will have ChatGPT write for them anyway) should have been:
“0/10 does not address the question.”
Anything more than that should not have been written by the TA. The TA is absolutely not being paid enough to write such lengthy feedback, and it isn’t a TA’s responsibility to deal with formal appeals. This whole thing was mismanaged by the tenured academics and administrators and should have never happened, and now they’re scapegoating the poor TA.
Material that is hazardous to online reactionaries needs to be discussed extremely carefully, and treating the students like royalty with lengthy bespoke feedback for baby’s-first-writing-project is just inviting disaster. Criticize them about their transphobia in-person during office hours or a small classroom setting where you can yell at them to put their phones away. Do not write that shit in the fucking chat window on moodle or blackboard where students can screenshot and post it to the toxic algorithmic apps that they actually pay attention to during their spare time instead of doing the fucking assigned readings.
I completely glossed over the word count. I don’t think I considered anything under a thousand words to be an essay since I left highschool, that was decades ago, now I’m kind of appalled that 650 words are considered an essay. Being concise is great but how do you even formulate what you are engaging with and provide an informed response with only 650 words in an academic context.
Tell that to my fucking environmental impact assessments professor in final year. "I'm being generous in giving you a 600 word count, you need to learn to be way more concise than that when you're dealing with ministers" eat my entire asshole, ANGUS.
...Actually much as I dislike the guy that's probably the best thing he did with us but god damn was he an obnoxious asshole about it, and god DAMN are those short assignments harder at the end of your degree when you're expected to actually achieve anything with it.
He's not wrong though
Yeah, I totally agree. Still a knob though. He gave us an example he wrote of a good paper that answered the question that was even shorter (he is literally a world expert who wrote a decent chunk of the IAIA best practices documentation, it's not that he doesn't know what he's doing) and all I could think while reading it was "I'm an undergrad. If I provided so few references on a paper in most of my units I would be pulled up on academic integrity. I'm not allowed to Just Say Stuff like you."
Presumably he didn't expect us to outdo what he did but I would have been very uncomfortable submitting it, it felt very, very under sourced.
Yes, totally. I went back to school after a few years of fulltime work, and they're different fields. You can't (well, probably better to say shouldn't) anticipate the working environment and enforce those requirements within the academic one because you're held to different standards. He's right in that ministers will only read the cover brief, if that, but he's wrong in implying that it's an acceptable yardstick while at school. Plus not everyone is going to graduate and write for government.
I mean, I'm sure that it's pretty much universal that you don't need to be anywhere near as anal about sourcing anywhere outside an academic context. It's still asking a lot of students to expect them to write something to that different standard with no training on how to do so - it was just a different expectation for that one unit. It was tough enough for me as a mature student in my 40s since I had just spent several years having it hammered into my head that every single idea I present must be supported by a reputable source or it's an ethical violation and I can get in trouble. Can't imagine how much tougher it would be for kids straight out of school.
(sorry undeleted my comment after i saw your reply)