Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

I can totally relate to what you're going through. I'm in my senior year of college and every single shitty grade I've gotten has stung- even more so when I spent hours studying for something or carefully crafting an assignment. People always tell me, "Oh, it's just a grade. It's not a big deal." But when you're in school and you've invested time and money into what you're doing, it is a big deal.

In one of my classes right now, we're talking about rating biases, which are evident in most forms of evaluation. For example, one rating bias is called a distributional error. One distributional error is strictness and it means that a rater (or a grader) will put nearly everyone in an average or below average category, no matter how amazing their work is. Strictness in this context means that nothing is ever perfect. It's a complete life outlook where you aren't going to be satisfied with anything. It's possible that your professor has a strictness distributional bias error where she expects something that is simply unachievable. And yeah, she might throw a few decent grades out there, but by and large, she might be grading everyone extremely strictly.

Another super common bias is called rater perspective and that's where when a rater (or evaluator or grader) gets an impression based off of ONE thing and applies that perspective to everything. So, this can be good or bad for the person who's being evaluated, depending on the nature of the bias. If you're one of the lucky ones to get the "halo" that means that your professor reads your thesis statement, thinks it's great, and then looks at the rest of your paper with this perspective of, "Oh, this student wrote a great paper!" If you get the "horns" on the other hand, your professor might read your thesis statement and think, "Ugh, this thesis statement is not very good." And then proceed to grade your entire paper with the perspective of, "This student did not write a good paper."

The point of what I'm saying is, you can't control everything when you're being evaluated by someone else. All you can do is see what nitpicky bullshit they marked off for on this one, and then move on to the next one with that knowledge. I've had professors that give an average grade of 50% which is beyond failing. They're impossible to fully please. But you can get pretty close if you take in all of their feedback and then go through the next assignment or exam with a mindset of what they want to see. Every time I do an assignment I'm thinking, okay, what do I know about this professor and what do I think they want from me? Even when they're being difficult, I can usually get a pretty close estimation of what they're relatively expecting and that has saved me countless times throughout university.

Make sure you go to office hours to try to build a rapport with her. If you can't find a topic that has a lot of sources that you're interested in, just pick a topic that is going to be easiest to deliver the best paper you can deliver. For example, I have absolutely no interest in Enron, but when I needed to do a paper on a fraudulent company, none of the companies I was interested in had reliable sources. My interest level in it wasn't outweighed by the difficulty of trying to find sources that didn't exist.

I can tell from reading your post and other things you've written that you are not unintelligent. You're not mediocre, and you are worthy of praise for the effort and corrections you made on your paper. Don't let one person's opinion be a deciding factor in your self-worth. Professors aren't perfect. They have a lot of problems and aren't immune to making mistakes or overlooking the effort a student has put into a paper.

Just get back on the saddle and show yourself what you can do. Then at the end of the semester, you can look back and know that she was wrong about you.

Best,

Charlie


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