In-class Essay Writing

I’m sure many of us know what this means. If not, let me explain briefly;

In-class essay writing involves writing an essay in class only and not being able to take it home with you to complete. I’m starting to find this very unreliable of depicting the abilities of a student. And of course this argument is coming from experience.

Recently I wrote a few essays this week (all of them being formative, meaning just meant for feedback only and not final marks), and they were very poorly done. And I must blame most of this because of the time frame in which we must FULLY complete the essay in, which is about just over an hour. I know many people may think this is a do-able task, but I’m not one of those thinkers who get their ideas right away and being jotting them down.

I need a place to think! I nice quiet environment for myself to generate my thoughts and I ideas, which is probably why I’m a night owl. Always starting my homework when everyone is asleep just so I can fully concentrate by myself, with no distractions.

Anyways, getting back to the essay, I received a level 2 on the essay (max is level 4) which is not what I had expected. Red marks across all the pages marked with “Doesn’t make sense”, “run-on sentence”, etc. It was very annoying to see this as obviously I had to rush the entire thing to get it complete on time. The feedback was totally useless to me as it was not of my best work. So then I think to myself, how can this be a good way to get reliable feedback so we can do better in the future? When it actually comes down the essay that counts, I’ll have no guidelines to follow.

I hope many of you agree with me that the fact that in-class essay writing is just absurd. At least allow us some time to formulate different ideas/brainstorm outside class and write it as well. I don’t understand the whole point of doing this as everyone has their own way of working. Saying all this , it reminds me that this also links to my other article or “blog” you can say, which I dumped my thoughts on education on the screen, saying how education is a messed up system that is very unfair.