[705] in Depressing_Thoughts
Evil Writing Requiem
aaron@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (aaron@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Dec 18 23:20:08 1988
As long as we're sharing our utterly delightful experiences with MIT's most
esteemed writing requirement, I have also found they're decisions extremely
arbitrary. I took the exam as a Freshman, and as I had just come from three
semesters of Philosophy classes, I chose not to write in the traditional
(and dull) 5 paragraph essay style. Oooo, they didn't like that. The
person to whom I spoke at the writing requirement office liked my writing,
but wasn't empowered to change my grade. In fact, whoever graded my paper
had written Pass (not Marginal Pass or anything silly like that) on it,
before crossing it out and writing Fail. Boy that made me feel just
wonderful.
My impression is that there is no possibility that the writing requirement
would ever give credit for anything as fun or interesting as 21.755. I
passed Phase I on an extremely dull paper from 24.08. The paper got an
A and got me an A in the course (from a slightly worse test average), but
only got a Marginal Pass from the writing people. I'm not impressed.
As for Phase II, well, I can hardly wait...
