Has Melbourne started with the "assigning 950 word essays to first and second years so they don't have to pay markers" trend?
Not sure what you mean? Most history courses have two essays, 2,500 and 1,500. Some have short assessments, even as short as 500 words, but they still have to pay markers. You just get a bit ripped off. We get paid a base rate that assumes 4,000 words per hour - so if you're marking 2,000 word essays it's only two per hour and that's fairly manageable. But when it's 500 word essays, that's eight an hour and very difficult because the time taken to write feedback isn't that much shorter. I tend to think any assessment below 1,500 words is a ripoff.
That's very true and in reality, I hate some of how I acted in that brief and never-to-be-repeated stint long ago.
Though it did leave me with a strong sense of how many people attending university probably shouldn't really be there (including me, arguably; while I don't regret it, that period had precisely zero bearing on how I earn a living now), and what a world of trouble we are storing up in being the kind of world (partly due to economic factors, partly plain credentialism) where that needs to be so.
It really worries me the calibre of material we pass on a daily basis. Often the problem is not so much the intellectual content, but appalling writing ability and a lack of motivation to achieve. I hate marking essays by people who clearly could do an acceptable job but instead throw together some slop with minimal research, because they know they'll still scrape through with a pass. Good writing skills and any awareness of how to structure an argument are all too rare.
I think university should be open to anybody who wishes to attend, but we have reached a point where many people attend not because they want to, not because it bears directly on their career or intellectual ambitions, but because they are either expected to attend or aren't entirely sure what to do with their lives so they just fall into it and sleepwalk through apathetically. I want to teach students who actually want to be here. It's frustrating how few of them seem to show that sort of desire.
(As a sidenote, it amazes me how many people I know have gone on to postgrad study because they STILL don't know what to do with their life after undergrad. They have no intention of becoming an academic, they are studying something with no clear focus on a career, and just seem to want to stay in the university cocoon.)
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