Is This Really Necessary?

A long time ago, in a college far, far away, an instructor wanted to know whether or not students in one of her courses had worked toward understanding the trajectory of the study of human psychology up to the latter part of the 19th century.  To assess this, she had her students write long-form essays in which they were expected to discuss the historical trends associated with the discipline and then make predictions about how these trends might have influenced some of the more significant developments in psychology to follow.  The students took the prompt and did their best and the yield was dozens of 3-5 page essays that they worked very, very hard to compose.

(I know that there may be any number of reservations about this fictional narrative so far, but please bear with me.)

Back to the story:

Here's what happened. 

The students spent a lot of time working on their compositions, worrying not just about the historical trajectory of psychology as a discipline but also about essay structure and style and punctuation and document formatting.  They knew, vaguely at least, that it was important to complete the assignment not only because their grades depended on it but that it was the kind of thing that students have to do to demonstrate their mastery of some concept or other.  In the world outside of the classroom, long-form essay writing was far from necessary as a viable skill for the vast majority of them (some of them were already participating in scholarly research studies and/or active on social media), but they all did the essay anyway.  They all knew, vaguely at least, how to write essays because they'd been through first-year composition courses and this was just another example of work they had to do in order to get at that idea of academic knowledge toward which they strove and that expensive piece of paper toward which they were investing so much time that they even imagined eventually framing on a wall somewhere for others to see.  This is the assignment, they thought, and I have to do it.  They scoped out empty tables at coffee shops or located nice temperate patches of grass under pleasantly broad trees or simply shut their bedroom doors and sat on their beds or at their desks with their computers and sipped at strong coffee or lemony tea or munched on Cheetos or vaped something that tasted like blueberries--all for focus on the essay assignment.  It wasn't necessarily a personally-sensitive assignment, but they alone valued that work, and they all probably knew it.

Well, the instructor valued the work, too.  So much so, in fact, that she spent countless hours reading the essays carefully in order to determine individually whether or not students were able to demonstrate the knowledge that they were supposed to have.  However, it was time-consuming and seemingly pointless beyond the immediate.  Just as her students muttered resigned complaints to their friends about the assigned work, she expressed frustration with the bulk of texts she'd committed herself to review and evaluate to her friends and family.  As she worked her way through the stack of papers (and maybe this was an unwieldy physical stack of printed papers and maybe this was a daunting digitally-delivered number of "yet-to-be-graded" on the learning management system), she tried to put aside concerns about writing style or punctuation, but they persisted anyway.  She noted that most of the papers were relatively well-written (what makes a perfect essay?), but she was spending as much time reading through the stack of paragraphs as she was spending evaluating the thoughtfulness and accuracy of the content.  She didn't spend much time providing explicit feedback about paragraph and sentence structure for each paper (though she did a little), and she didn't think she needed to (and she was probably right).  Eventually, after many late hours, she had waded through the mire and provided valuable feedback about the students' conceptions of psychology and also, when students needed it, what they might do to improve their future essays.

Then the grades were entered and the essays, with feedback, were appropriately disseminated to their authors.  The students, many of them giddy with anticipation upon receiving the evaluations and feedback, looked at their grades with whatever individual satisfaction their work and their personalities afforded, and then they moved on to the next thing.

An enormous amount of work was invested in the process as a whole.  The students did their best to demonstrate their mastery of competencies and the instructor did her best to evaluate them appropriately and accurately.  Learning was happening.  Maybe there were some students who failed to demonstrate competency through their essays, but, overall, the whole process seemed pretty effective.

Then, when the next part of the course started, everyone forgot about the essays.  With few exceptions, to be precise, nobody ever saw or thought about those essays again.  All that work vanished like a cloudy, blueberry-tinged vape-puff.