skool

University life circa 2001...essay due=hammer it out in the last 2 hrs, slap your student ID number on plus and an unusually high amount of intelligent sounding synonyms for simple words intersected by a plethora of direct quotes hoping to fool the profs into thinking you might have actually read the textbook.

University life now=I am up to my ears in papers.  I know that we used to complain about the sneakiness of multiple choice exams..."which is the most correct" garbage, but seriously, at least that method is quick and painless!  I am in constant disbelief about how long it has takes to write assignments these days.  Weeks!  I write, then re-write, then re-evaluate, and the vicious cycle continues...all the while the institutions have gotten smarter.  They no longer count essay length in 'pages' and now refer to it in 'word count'.  We are then allowed 1-2 direct quotes allowed per 1000-3000 word essay.  Direct quotes-that was my bread and butter!  Then, when you've read and re-read it so many times that your eyeballs are almost permanently cross-eyes (shout out to "One Crazy Summer" for those who've seen it), you hastily hop online to submit it.  At which stage the powers that be, up the ante one more time as your paper is digitally scanned into a database called "turnitin", a plagiarism wizard.  This database scans your document into the database for future comparisons, while searching for similarities between yours and the last 19394893 students who wrote a paper on the 'progressive movement of nursing studies in the tertiary sector'.  GAH!  At the end of the ten minute scan, you are presented with a percentage that you are supposed to be remaining calm about.  As if the assignment was not enough stress!  Gone were the easy days of perfecting my "BS Artist" degree with my writing...

Weird because I suck at writing this blog, until I've got a writing assignment hanging over my head.  Then to procrastinate, the ideas start flow like the salmon of Capistrano.  If you want to get a sucky thing done, pull an even suckier thing over your head...not that this blog is sucky-but...ok yep, this is rock bottom.