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I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.
What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.
Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).
I'd like to know this too. Given her mother is a lawyer, I wonder if it's surprisingly about on par or no worse than others'. (Apart from citing the Bible.)
I have not yet read it, but do suspect something punitive given how rare it is to get an actual 0, the worst kind of F you can possibly get, if you've turned in something of adequate length and effort. This isn't failing to turn anything in at all, or just your name a title.
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I think this exactly. It’s not good but other east’s of equally poor quality likely received passing grades. But nobody can prove it either way. So in essence arguing the object level is meaningless.
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