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Just speaking personally, and airing my elitism, I haven't written an essay that bad since at least middle school, just from a writing perspective. But I didn't go to Oklahoma. I don't know what the other essays looked like.
If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.
Any other argument about the quality of the essay lacks rigor.
Interestingly, this implies that the purpose of a grade is to rank a student among their cohort rather than to an objective standard; that if you throw a bunch of morons into a university-level class, you curve scale and give an A to the best of them rather than just fail them all.
Empirically, this seems to be exactly what happens, but it leads to grade and credential inflation as ever more unprepared students are sent off to college; just another institution to spend 4 years doing pointless busywork until you get a piece of paper, high school 2.0, except that now you are four years older, 5 figures in debt, and there is not a virgin girl left among the graduates.
College delenda est.
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I mean it might be the University of Oklahoma, but it's still the University of Oklahoma, that is, a state flagship. It doesn't get the serious bottom of the barrel students- in the local neighborhood Texas Tech or Kansas State would be the schools notorious for graduating students who are barely literate. This isn't some HBCU or Police-Department-Requires-a-Diploma mill.
Well clearly they had one student who wrote this way, we have to see how other students wrote before we can judge whether there's politics involved in grading this essay so low.
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I remember helping my dad grade essays when he was a professor, and I followed a strict rubric. The ones at the end of my grading scored much higher than the ones at the beginning (until I went back and re-graded them), because my expectations at the start were a lot higher than by the time I got to the end.
lol, reminds me of my year as a math teacher. Halfway through, I went from "I want right answers to these homework questions" to "I want to see that you tried" to "just turn in something so that I can give you a grade". That's about the time I gave up on teaching and focused on surviving until summer, when I got nonrenewed.
The mental image of a younger you thinking that being a teacher would be about teaching warms my heart.
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