To be a successful student, it often comes down to three important factors:
1. Refuse social interaction, and allow yourself knuckle down occasionally.
2. Befriend your teachers/lecturers, as they will often have words of wisdom and opportunities available that they don't feel they have to tell you about unless you're on first name terms with them.
3. Know the system.
You may have never heard of it before, but an academic rubric is a very firm part of our educational structure. A rubric is (and you can fail me for quoting wikipedia) "a set of criteria and standards typically linked to learning objectives that is used to assess or communicate about product, performance, or process tasks." It an assessment tool, and one that many students are very aware of.
In basics, marking criteria is a way of marking student's work en mass, while also giving time for the lecturer/teacher to exist outside of the classroom. It is a generic set of rules that the student has to have adhered to, and a set of lessons that they should have learned. It is the devil incarnate for those in education, as it is the little list of things that you've most likely forgotten to talk about in your 1500 word essay, and the single little tick box that sits you in the realm of a high 2:1, instead of a first.
It is fucking evil.
This method of assigning marking criteria has given students a chance to learn the rules and tick the boxes without going to a single lecture. This is the tool that takes a wave of creative upstarts with an honest passion for what they do, and then shakes it's finger and orders you to conform for another 3 years.
It is the view of your writer that student's don't pay up to £30k a year to conform and learn exactly the same as everybody else, only to come away with a 2:2 because they didn't learn exactly the lessons that a piece of paper has commanded. £30k for mediocrity? That stinks of a bit of a rip off to me. I don't believe in the stories of the bible, but at least their rules were supposedly carved in stone as opposed to printed from the same Word document up and down the country.
In an example, I often imagine that marking criteria is used because another, larger tick box has declared that an average amount of knowledge must be given to the 10-150 students on each course per semester. This teaches the bottom of the class a wonderful amount of new things, while teaching the more experienced members of the class (as my lecturer often famously proclaims) "fuck nothing". To selfishly use myself as a further example, I come from a just-about-middle-class background in the countryside, and I certainly was not the smartest from my school of 800 or so pupils. However, from doing a reasonable amount of work throughout the whole of college, and from actually having a vague interest in the subject I came out with pretty good results. However, anyone who's read this blog further than a page will tell you that I'm basically a frustrated creative person, who's learning (to reuse my lecturer's famous phrase) not a lot.
University is a wonderful chance to get out into the world, and explore your dreams for everything that they are. It's also a chance to become completely disillusioned by your dreams, causing you to run home to your mother and work as a mechanic for the rest of your days. This isn't to say that either outcome will make you happier, but when you're spending that much money, and putting yourself out on that much of a limb, and destroying yourself physically, emotionally and doing it all for the 1 in 20 chance that you'll get a job vaguely close to where you want to be- you'd think that there would be a silver lining.
My university experience has been an amazing year and a bit, and I've spent a ton of low-interest loan on equipment that will last me onwards into my professional life. I've gained skills that I could not have imagined while living in miserable little Yeovil, and met some of the most fascinating people that I'll ever meet- and not one of these things has happened because of my course. University is the only time that you're in the presence of so many people who are positive, and who are driven to do well in life- and it's contagious. It's not selfish to want happiness- and the second that you see that everyone is working together to get there, you'll realise that any pettiness and rivalry between your friends back at home really doesn't matter, and if you want to get anywhere then, chances are, you won't be able to do it alone.
In conclusion, marking criteria can curl up and die in a hole.
Serious, that's it. If the educational system is too lazy to allow me to learn, then I'm too fed up to conclude and finally justify my views with an assortment of unbiased comments from other respected individuals, and I'm sure as hell not Harvard referencing. Although I may give a word count.
Word count: 868
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