Critical Analysis Of Rebecca Schuman's The End Of The College

In “The End of the College Essay” article, Rebecca Schuman, who’s an English professor, discusses her opinion and overall feeling on the benefits of removing the essay from the college level. She mentions the issues of plagiarism and a lack of effort in a sense and how they have become so common. Schuman expresses that instead of assigning essays or papers, that it should be reverted back to exams that are taken in written form as well as orally. Her attitude throughout the entire article gives off the impression that writing an essay may be too hard for college students to do effectively. With my share of writing papers or essays, some of her points may be true to some extent, but the way she has it come across is very poor. It feels like …show more content…
“Preparing for a multiple choice test is generally pretty easy. All you have to do is recognize the information when you see it” (Rolnick, 2009). This is true because it’s easy to remember or recall information if you are given four choices as well as mess up the entire thing and the save your grade by potential bonus point opportunities. The problem with taking it orally, it is hard to tell who actually doesn’t know the answer or has a case of shyness. If the class is large enough, the smartest person that knows the answer to a question resorts to keeping quiet because they have a bad case anxiety. It’s hard to tell of they are just shy or they don’t know the answer, which a major flaw in that aspect. Other students may feel as though they can piggyback on the students that are answering. I will add that a way to avoid this dilemma is to go to an individual student, whether in class or one-on-one, and do the oral exam that way. In my opinion, essays show a much greater result in expressing an individual’s thoughts and feelings.” An essay exam requires that you harness a thorough, working knowledge of the subject, such that you can respond on the spot to any prompt with an interesting and coherent presentation of your ideas” (Rolnick). Some people write papers for fun, but there are some who only …show more content…
I myself dislike writing papers, but I know that if I don’t try and better myself, then how will it benefit me in the future? Plagiarism was an issue with me, but I was mainly having issues with knowing the correct way to cite sources. There was an instance where I was in a rush and procrastinated until the night before and did it knowingly, but I owned up to my consequences and haven’t done it since then. Schuman seems to feel that assigning essays isn’t worth it anymore, but that could just be from personal experience as a professor. The ways she expresses her opinion in a very sour and bitter manner, which causes a spark of overwhelming hatred for this woman right off the