14 – Introduction
string together such words and phrases in order to create the illusion
of control and understanding is relatively easy with a bit of practice.
To understand them, to make judgements on them, to make (or not to
make) them part of your own story or ‘discourse’ of yourself requires
time and work. Dazzling the tutor is incidental to this more important
task.
The third temptation in keeping tutors too much in mind is
to toady to their theoretical predilections and opinions in the belief
that this will earn you a higher grade. It must first of all be acknowledged that, as any number of studies have shown, tutors can be quite
unreliable in their assessments of written work. (Many departments
recognise this and use various techniques for improving reliability.)
Different tutors can vary significantly in the grade they allow to a
given essay. This fact might encourage you to believe that the best
way to get high grades is to flatter your tutor’s opinions. It appears,
however, that even an individual tutor may vary quite considerably
in the value he or she attaches to the same piece of work from one
time to another. It is also the case that some tutors are flattered by
having you attack their own work, since in order to attack it you will
need to have read it with care and attention. In my own experience
the genuine conflicts about the substance of an opinion occur mostly
over the work of graduate students. With undergraduates many such
difficulties turn out to arise from misunderstandings not so much
about the substance of a particular opinion as about its relevance to
the essay question or about the quality of the student’s analysis of
supporting evidence. So before you assume a tutor is biased against
you, do as much as you can to put into practice the concerns of this
book, which seek to initiate you into the rites and conventions of
academic debate.
But where there is considerable disparity between your own
assessment of the value of your essay and the assessment the tutor
makes, the best recourse is to argue it out with the tutor in question.
Any good tutor should be prepared to give particular comments, to
defend his or her judgement and to revise it if warranted. It is this
matter of detailed comment that you should ask for, whether the
examiner seems biased in favour or against. Marginal comment, a
defence of the overall assessment, and some help with what you need
string together such words and phrases in order to create the illusion
of control and understanding is relatively easy with a bit of practice.
To understand them, to make judgements on them, to make (or not to
make) them part of your own story or ‘discourse’ of yourself requires
time and work. Dazzling the tutor is incidental to this more important
task.
The third temptation in keeping tutors too much in mind is
to toady to their theoretical predilections and opinions in the belief
that this will earn you a higher grade. It must first of all be acknowledged that, as any number of studies have shown, tutors can be quite
unreliable in their assessments of written work. (Many departments
recognise this and use various techniques for improving reliability.)
Different tutors can vary significantly in the grade they allow to a
given essay. This fact might encourage you to believe that the best
way to get high grades is to flatter your tutor’s opinions. It appears,
however, that even an individual tutor may vary quite considerably
in the value he or she attaches to the same piece of work from one
time to another. It is also the case that some tutors are flattered by
having you attack their own work, since in order to attack it you will
need to have read it with care and attention. In my own experience
the genuine conflicts about the substance of an opinion occur mostly
over the work of graduate students. With undergraduates many such
difficulties turn out to arise from misunderstandings not so much
about the substance of a particular opinion as about its relevance to
the essay question or about the quality of the student’s analysis of
supporting evidence. So before you assume a tutor is biased against
you, do as much as you can to put into practice the concerns of this
book, which seek to initiate you into the rites and conventions of
academic debate.
But where there is considerable disparity between your own
assessment of the value of your essay and the assessment the tutor
makes, the best recourse is to argue it out with the tutor in question.
Any good tutor should be prepared to give particular comments, to
defend his or her judgement and to revise it if warranted. It is this
matter of detailed comment that you should ask for, whether the
examiner seems biased in favour or against. Marginal comment, a
defence of the overall assessment, and some help with what you need