<< They hear that profs don't
actually read their papers. Well, I'm not surprised about this. I
reviewed a grad student paper for a lousy in house grad student journal
once. It was awful: the author spelled consensus six different ways, had
the numbers on unemployment over the past 50 yrs all wrong, incomplete
sentences. It was clearly a seminar paper that must have passed through
the hands of some prof at some point, but apparently s/he never bothered to
point out these mistakes. >>
I agree with all these points.
There is a drive at my school to do "writing across the curriculum." In both my Securities and Investments and Banking courses I assigned papers. I grade for content, style, presentation, grammar etc. Mind you, this is in upper level finance courses - and students told me their writing had NEVER been edited as carefully as I had done. I think they appreciated my effort, but I'm not sure this is the correct way to proceed. I think academe should either give up on literacy and numeracy as a valid "output" of so-called higher education, or roll their fuckin sleeves up and do the job right. You can't mechanize/automate/internet the process of learning to write - it is INHERENTLY labor intensive - for both the student and teacher. I teach a four course load and cannot effectively teach finance and writing/language arts(?).
We need to have a very public debate (of course nothing will happen) on this.
Jason