# Teaching > General Teaching >  The Types of Undergraduate (humour)

## Lokasenna

So, the last several weeks have been an insane whirlwind of essay marking for me - hence my relative absence from LitNet. To stave off frustration, I found myself putting together a comic guide to the differeng sorts of undergraduates, and how we might deal with their essays. I thought it might give people a giggle, so I'll post it up. It was a lot of fun to write, and I'm sure that many of the other teachers on here will know exactly what I'm talking about.

The Types of Undergraduate and How to Deal with their Essays: A Bestiary

To the inexperienced marker, the thought of grading undergraduate essays might be a pleasurable one. Perhaps they have conjured the image of cosy evenings in, enjoying a bottle of wine and some light jazz, whilst absorbing and appreciating the wisdom and endeavours of their students. Sadly, the reality is less edifying: long hours hunched over piles of paperwork, correcting grammar, altering footnotes, and generally despairing of humanity while reaching for the Benzedrine. You soon learn, however, that undergraduates and their essays come in distinct flavours; here then, in no particular order, is a spotters’ guide to some of the more dangerous species of undergraduate essay writer...

*The Malapropism Maniac*
Usually a clever student whose intelligence is matched only by their desire to show just how clever they are. In an effort to appear like the urbane and sophisticated academic they know at heart they are, the student takes any word with less than four syllables and replaces it with one of at least twelve. In the best cases, this can have you reaching for the dictionary with a muttered oath every half-page; in the worst, it looks like the student has had some sort of profound psychotic episode involving a thesaurus. Expect maybe one in ten of these fancy words to be used correctly. The most astute and capable of Malapropism Maniacs eschew reality entirely, often preferring to invent their own words in defiance of anything contained in the rich lexicon of world language.

*The Mystifier*
The Mystifier is a close relative of the Malapropism Maniac, but whilst the latter’s use of complicated terminology often obscures the point they are trying to make, the former uses such language to disguise the fact that they have no point at all. Expect to spend four hours translating a single sentence to discover that ‘Hamlet is a prince, and that’s quite interesting’. It is entirely possible that you will discover half way through the year that the Mystifier is in fact an engineering student who has been attending your classes in error. In the land of the Mystifier, confusion reigns supreme.

*The Out-Of-Time Kid*
A student who has failed to grasp the linear nature of time. The Out-Of-Time Kid’s essay rockets crazily across the epochs, making connections between literary events that would only be possible with the help of Doctor Who. Expect the student to imply that the rise of the novel in the 19th century affected the metaphysical poets, and to infer that writer of _Beowulf_ knew Jane Austen and/or Mary Shelley. The Out-Of-Time Kid should not be confused with...

*The Ran-Out-Of-Time Kid*
With six essays all due on the same day in late November, the Ran-Out-Of-Time Kid will nevertheless avoid doing any work until five days before the deadline, at which point they will invest in several multipacks of Red Bull, buy enough Pro Plus tablets to raise the share price, and settle down for what they hope will be a sleepless period of frenzied genius. Expect the essay to become more incoherent as it goes on: in some cases it will devolve into a final series of bullet points, in others it will simply finish mid-word. You can hunt for a bibliography if you want, but you will never find it. Fun fact: after all that Pro Plus, the street value of the Ran-Out-Of-Time Kid’s blood would be enough to pay off their student loan. 

*The Seer*
The Seer sees all and knows all. It may be a superb essay or an awful one, but in either case you can expect there to be no footnotes at all. A storm of quotations, both primary and secondary, are pulled from thin air in the full expectation that the marker is just as omniscient as the student: seasoned markers will know the difficulty of suppressing the involuntary sob of anguish that comes of flicking through a 400 page novel in an attempt to verify whether Moll Flanders does indeed extol the aphrodisiac qualities of boiled cabbage.

*The Freud-Ate-My-Homework*
One of the difficulties in having a compulsory module on literary theories is that some of the students attempt to use them: the Freud-Ate-My-Homework uses literary theory as a substitute for actual thought, and works it into every conceivable sentence in the essay. Not only does this send you groping for _The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory_ to remind yourself of what Lacan was all about, but you can also expect to endure the purgatory of marking such monstrosities as a Marxist reading of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ or an Eco-Feminist take on _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_. Any student who mentions Slavoj Žižek gets an automatic Third.

*The Ian Paisley*
A student who is well and truly in the pulpit. An Ian Paisley’s essay will avoid the sober and reflective tones usual to academic writing in favour of a fire-and-brimstone style rhetorical _tour de force_ full of wailing and gnashing of teeth. On close examination, you can usually see the spittle on the page from the student’s private oration. Alas, the student often works his or herself into such a foam-freckled frenzy that they do not allow such inconvenient factors as moderation, circumspection, or even reality, to get in the way of a good rant; fortunately, it does not matter what mark you give them, as they are destined for a career in politics or the Church regardless.

*The Reviewer*
An embryonic journalist, the Reviewer forgoes actual analysis of a primary text in favour of passing value judgements (or casting moral aspersions, whichever is more fun). Expect a slew of breathless platitudes about how wonderful a text is, usually capped a by wide-eyed and nausea-inducing claim that it ‘still has relevance today’ or something equally bathetic. If they do not like the work, expect the author to be accused of closet Nazi-ism. The Reviewer will almost always refer to the author by their first name, unless the writer only has a first name in which case they will be ‘darling Homer’ or ‘dear Chrétien’. A fun game you can play: try to match up the Reviewer with the newspaper they will eventually work for. Are they a simpering _Guardian_ista? A militant _Indy_ leftist? Or an oleaginous creep destined to end up as a food critic for _The Speccie_?

*The Wrencher*
This student knows exactly what essay they want to write. What a shame, then, that you failed to ask the right question. Attempting to make the best of a bad situation, the student will take your essay asking about the relevance of social norms in _The Mill on the Floss_, proudly announce that the real issue of interest is the treatment of gender, and then launch in to a magnificent 1,500 word tangent about that. If you are lucky, they might just have enough self-awareness to remember to return briefly to the terms of the set question in the final sentence of their conclusion. Expect them to look horrified with their mark during the essay hand-back session.

*The Generaliser*
A close relative of the Seer, the Generaliser likewise sees all and knows all. Whilst the former does at least pull evidence from _somewhere_, the latter instead takes upon him/herself the task of explaining the historical or social context of a piece of literature _in their own words_. What they lack in advanced degrees, they make up for in sheer gumption, often reducing complex and nuanced historical situations to a pre-school level of understanding. Expect to be told that ‘death was very common in the Middle Ages’ or that ‘Victorian society contained many women interested in love’.

*The Follower-Of-The-One-True-Word*
A student who has read only one book, but is inordinately proud of the fact. This will usually be a popular publication, often by a journalist or ex-politician, and despite at best having only tangential relevance to the set question the ardent Follower will produce a shower of footnotes. The author of this work will be name-checked at least once in the body of the essay, and described in adoring terms as a ‘noted cultural commentator’ or ‘intellectual heavyweight’. More unfortunately still, like all true believers the Follower-Of-The-One-True-Word is never far from their holy book, and you can thoroughly expect them to produce it in tutorials or essay hand-back sessions while tediously explaining exactly why _Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years_ is relevant to the study of Romantic poetry.

*The Inevitable 2:1*
If this student were a colour, it would be beige. They are bland, bland, bland. So too, unfortunately, is their essay. It is not good, but nor is it bad; it does not do anything particularly right, but it does not get anything particularly wrong either. Having decided within the first few sentences that this is destined for a 65-ish mark, the only remotely stimulating thing about the essay is the rising sense of panic in the marker’s stomach over the fact that they have literally nothing to say in the proforma.

*The Webmaster*
One inevitably wonders whether this student suffers from agoraphobia. Either that, or they have not realised that our university comes with a library. The Webmaster will not have read any books, possibly not even the primary text, but will attempt to make up for this deficiency by using plenty of online resources. Expect a kind of shock-and-awe approach to footnoting. The better kinds of Webmasters will usually limit themselves to JSTOR articles, and if you are particularly lucky you might even find that one or two of the many cited works are almost relevant to the set question. If you are unlucky, expect to encounter Wikipedia, articles from the Daily Mail, TED talks, lunatic wordpresses, and rambling tumblrs written by opinionated high-schoolers. If you work with literature that deals with the Nazis, the American presidency, Shakespeare, or Norse mythology, the Webmaster will almost certainly root out the most paranoid and deranged of conspiracy theory websites to cite repeatedly: it is common at this stage to forego the Benzedrine and reach for the Valium instead.

*The Seeker-Of-Da-Vinci’s-Code*
This student sees the interconnectedness of all, and there is nothing you can do about it. Strangely enough, it is always Christian mythology that forms the nexus of all ideas in all literature. If a novel mentions a tree, it MUST represent Eden; if there is a man in the text, he MUST be a Christ-figure. Unsurprisingly, the student then uses this ‘connection’ as a means of linking texts that no sane person would ever put together: expect to hear how Grendel’s Mother and Mrs Malaprop, when closely compared, can both be shown to be representations the Virgin Mary. Essay markers dealing with pre-Christian texts are by no means exempt from the influence of this student, who in defiance of all the logic of time and geography will happily argue that Medea and Clytemnestra are both Eve-figures.

*The Font-Of-Madness*
It might be a good essay, it might be a bad one: it is impossible to tell, as you are totally distracted by the student’s crazed approach to fonts. Their decision to commence in Comic Sans was at best questionable, but it seems they too tired of it at an early stage: expect the font to change to something else equally inappropriate, possibly multiple times, sometimes even in mid-word. If the student moves into using the 2012 Olympic font, it is likely they are punishing you for something.

*The Weirdo*
The Weirdo, as you might imagine, specialises in the weird. Writing an essay is not so much an academic endeavour as it is a bizarre form of psychological warfare practiced against you, their tutor. The only thing you can expect, alas, is the unexpected. Your humble compiler of this guide could attempt to list some of the worst excesses found in essays produced by Weirdos, but no list can be comprehensive: the student will always find some new eccentricity, against which you have no mental defence, to torture you with. Perhaps they will impose a five-inch margin on their work, or randomly decided to start writing in Swahili, or abandon their analysis of love metaphors in John Donne’s poetry in favour of a discussion on the effects of _Perestroika_ on the Iron Curtain. If you have the misfortune to encounter a weirdo, be afraid. Be very afraid.

*The It’s-So-Good-I-Wish-I-Had-Written-It*
The most aggravating of students, but fortunately also the rarest. Their way of getting back at you is to produce an essay of astounding technical ability, with malice aforethought. The eloquence will dazzle, the argument will be breath-taking in its originality, the referencing will be unimpeachable. Not only will you wish you had written it, you may very well doubt you could have written it. Most crushing of all will be the essay hand-back session, where the student will sit stony-faced and impassive while you burble witless and adoring superlatives at them: they may condescend to crack a smile as they leave the room, but showing true elation would be beneath them.

*The Student-Not-Appearing-In-This-Bestiary*
Who is this student? You will never know, because no force in heaven and earth can extract an essay from them. This student unerringly experiences a personal apocalypse around the essay deadline. Perhaps they ate a dodgy curry, perhaps their student dorm has been closed for emergency fumigation, perhaps Mildred the goldfish has suddenly and unexpectedly departed for the great big aquarium in the sky, but there is always a reason for why they have not handed in an essay for you to mark. Elderly great-aunts and great-uncles across the land should fear the sudden spike in their mortality rates around submission time, and the World Health Organisation is currently investigating the periodic re-emergences of Black Death in young people in certain university towns at fixed points in the year.

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## kev67

You must have marked a lot of students' essays in order to derive eighteen different classifications.

I think in my youth I may have been guilty of being a malapropism maniac or mystifier. Not that I had to write very many essays as a Software Engineering student.

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## Lokasenna

> I think in my youth I may have been guilty of being a malapropism maniac or mystifier. Not that I had to write very many essays as a Software Engineering student.


Many hundreds by this stage!

As for myself, I think I might have been a bit of a Seer during my own undergrad days...

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## Hawkman

Loki, that was a lot of fun! frighteningly accurate as well. I remember from my time as an undergraduate a particular student whose sole propose was to bewilder. The tactic worked on her tutors as they consistently gave her 1sts. However, to anyone with a basic command of English and the ability to write coherently, her essays made absolutely no sense whatsoever. What they actually revealed was a distressing inability to express herself coherently. The woman's thought processes were tangental in the extreme, and revealed the depressing reality that her tutors were either idiots or so intimidated by her style that their own limited command of English would be frighteningly exposed to ridicule if they dared to criticise it. I had more than one whose own use of English was at the very least, questionable. e.g.. a "dearth" rather than meaning a lack, as understood by those whose knowledge of the language enables them to discern that this means "lack or scarcity," was to him, an over-abundance. Then there was the woman, who deliberately and with malice aforethought, mispronounced the word lucida in a lecture. Even a class full of art students were shocked by this tactic. I attribute her pretentious linguistic deviance to the fact that her highest qualification was an MA in "American Studies" and the fact that she was a self-confessed hairdresser before gravitating towards academia.

Your identification of the compulsory inclusion of "theory" into degree courses should not necessarily be considered a bad thing. It only becomes so when one is subjected to the incoherent ramblings of Deleuze and Guattari and nearly all of Derrida. Foucault should not be taken lightly, though a little Spivak goes a long way... Taken to extremes, the rise of "digital humanities", will probably ultimately result in human study becoming extinct. Eventually, books will be written, and then critiqued and analysed, by computers, without any human intervention whatsoever. Human agency will only be focussed upon digital dexterity in the manipulation of game station controllers. Gone will be shakespeare and Milton. They will be replaced by Minecraft and Far Cry 4. Perhaps a tenuous link to literature will be maintained by the virtual realisation of Middle Earth, where students, as Hobbits, will lose themselves or be devoured by Trolls (or possibly Orks).

Live and be well - H

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## Lykren

I mentioned Slavoj iek in a sociology paper last semester. Here are a couple sentences from that paper:

Kim says I think you've seen every side of me on my show, and this wealth of mundane knowledge, which seems to equate monumental concerns (i.e. Kims insistence she had not considered issues of race prior to the birth of her son) with trivial detail (It's relaxing to see them discuss constipation cures), gives viewers a sense of purity because it implicitly permits the denial of the duty to perform the kind of attention which categorizes information according not only to its immediate impact, but to its relationship to and interaction with other data. In other words the imperative to analyze the connections of the world beyond its connection to oneself disappears as soon as we cease to concede the dynamic patterns of dominance and submission which characterize those connections, and the world becomes bathed in a rationale of tranquilizing moral relativity.

'Kim' here is Kim Kardashian. She was the assigned essay topic.

I think I qualify as a mystifier  :Biggrin:

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## Babyguile

> To the inexperienced marker, the thought of grading undergraduate essays might be a pleasurable one. Perhaps they have conjured the image of cosy evenings in, enjoying a bottle of wine and some light jazz, whilst absorbing and appreciating the wisdom and endeavours of their students.


I have recently been accepted onto a PGCE course to teach history in secondary schools and this is exactly my image of what marking will be like. Well, at least it was until very recently when I did some marking myself and struggled to read awful handwriting. I also found myself stumbling upon huge amounts of grammatical errors, which I had to painstakingly correct before I could even think about commenting on the points that the pupils were actually making in their responses.

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