Feb 14, 2012
Pickiest professor ever docks student for not having a 1-inch margin
The prof was right, of course… The margin in question isn’t one inch. It’s clearly a full 32nd of an inch shy of the requirement. He couldn’t rightly give full credit. If he did, everyone would start fudging their margins and soon the prof would be dealing with infractions as large as a sixteenth of an inch.
(via Reddit)
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My wife had a professor get out a ruler and make her reprint her paper in front of him because he suspected she’d fudged the margins. She hadn’t, and her paper was longer than what was required anyway.
As a TA that routinely has to mark papers, I think people underestimate how valuable an instructor’s/TA’s time is, and the purpose of assigning margins and lengths.
When I’m grading an assignment that’s supposed to be 8-10 pages, and a student hands in 12 pages, I throw the last two in the garbage before I even read it.
You should have chosen a different profession then. The students time is just as valuable.
Many professional organizations have strict requirements to be followed when submitting a paper. If you cannot be bothered to take a little time to get the font, spacing, margins and style right, the paper will automatically fail. As in many areas in life, a failure to consider the purpose and requirements of something is not a waste of your time, it is a waste of the end user’s time.
As Xyxthus said, it’s a matter of being professional and showing you’re competent enought o follow diretions.
In the professional world, if you’re told to give a 15 minute presentation, it better be 15 or less. People have this idea of “more is better” when that’s not true in many cases. Part of the over “grade” may be seeing how well you can compact the information into 15 minutes; you’d have to be well-prepared and genuinely know the material.
A lot of people don’t realize that following the guidelines is a skill you need to learn. If someone tells you to write a paper of 7 pages, don’t write 14 pages. I’ve seen fellow students who had to write a short 6-pages paper and who ended up handing in 20-30 pages. You need to be able to select the most important and relevant information and delineate your subject. If you can’t do that then you are failing at writing an academic paper. I’ve had a prof who told us on the exam that we had to answer 3 large questions and we could only write 2.5 pages per question, he was only going to read the first 7 pages we’d hand in and throw out the rest.
A different profession? Really? Have you ever sat down to grade 100 plus papers? It’s never fun…
I had a high school pre-calculus teacher that had us write 8″ long essays for extra credit (and boy did we need the extra credit). Eight inches long. Not word count, not margin size. Every time one of us turned in a paper, he would slam his ruler on the desk to make sure it wasn’t under 8″. Even if it were 1/16 inch short, he’d hand it back and make us do it over.
I point out wrong margins in papers all time!
Hell, I even criticise font sizes and choices.
I do too. This is obviously a science paper, and science needs precision. I often return papers with points off for technical and grammatical errors. Directions are to be followed.
I concur with Paul & Donna, this critique is about precision and direction following, not number of words or length of the assignment. In scientific journals, margin sizes, font sizes and choices and even type point are CRITICAL and the publisher has the right (and usually will) reject a paper for such infractions. The entirety of APA style is based on consistency of the presentation of information and this professor was demonstrating that point. I had a critical paper rejected as an undergrad because my running head was too long, but it was a worthy rejection when every character counts for publication purposes!
I would have argued that the error falls within the tolerances of printer and/or paper inaccuracy and is therefore invalid as a determinant of my personal precision.
My thoughts exactly.
BDub, if you ever had to get a job where someone was paying you for a 1 inch margin, you wouldn’t get paid no matter who’s fault, yours or the printer. The customer paid for a 1 inch margin and you tried to sell them something that wasn’t. THAT is the lesson.
Near nothing in the world is absolutely 100% perfect. No 2 products are exactly alike. There are acceptable tolerances that all products meet before they are sent to market. Produce for example, is sold in cans that are all ever so slightly different in weight, but all +/- only a small amount.
In this case, it was more than likely the printer that fell 1/32 of an inch out of spec, which is by nearly all standards within acceptable tolerances. If such perfect precision was demanded, then no paper would have been acceptable. Even a paper that perfectly meets the 1 inch margin would likely be 1/2000th of an inch off perfect.
The teacher was just looking for something to criticize and they took 1/32″ as the only thing they could find.
i’ve published academic papers. that’s a load of hooey. as a publisher who took the papers and reformatted them to fit the journal i couldn’t care didley-squat what font it was in or what the margins were. i cared that it met it’s word count, because i knew how many words would fit on a page of the journal and how much space i had to fill.
pretentious prat.
This said, I think one has to be strict when teaching this kind of stuff. Otherwise it does go nuts after a couple of times.
But surely if you’re submitting someting for a journal the layout is down to the designers? The people submitting just need to send the text, and whoever’s setting it can just put it into a template so it’s all the same.
And your margins are actually smaller, meaning you wrote more!
Not necessarily. Some tricks to making pages look longer/shorter include reducing or enlarging everything from margins to font sizes and such. Expanding into the margins isn’t always a testament to how much you wrote.
I’ve had my papers marked for a margin that was off by less than a 1/16th of an inch. Worst part was, the margins were correct when I typed the paper: the school’s printer had a quirky zoom setting when printing PDFs.
I had an English professor who made everyone bring a ruler to class every time we met. We’d get counted off if we had incorrect margins or if we forgot to bring a ruler meaning that she’d have to measure the margins herself.
I bet the assignment was NOT to use a 1″ margin. Maybe 3/4″….
It’s written in ink: 1″ margin.
This makes the most sense. If the margins were larger than they were supposed to be, there is less written on each page.
I used to fudge the margins the other way, to get fewer words on the page. How else can you write a 10 page paper on NAFTA? Or a 12 page paper on Chinese literature?
Now, a 12 page paper on Chinese food…that would be easy!
I had a history prof in college that would only let us write 1 page papers. We had to use Times New Roman font, not less than 8 pt., but we could use as little or as much margins as we wanted. We could also do single spacing. And he expected well-worded, 5-paragraph essays.
This is not uncommon because typically the student would make the margin too large, thus being able to fulfill the page requirements with fewer words. But in this case, the margin was too small… not sure why that’s a problem except for failure to follow directions. I guess that is a problem.
Profs will set word limits too. Quite reasonably, I think. One of the points of writing an assignment should be being able to make your argument without going on eternally. Not to mention, profs won’t get paid extra for marking a super-long-windbag of paper instead of one that was actually written to specifications.
But whatever. In this case I hope it’s a joke. That seems more likely (that the person who wrote the essay is losing one twentieth of a mark) than that they’re getting docked 5% for some mildly creative formatting.
I would literally go insane if my teacher docked me for this…
If you don’t get it, you never took a Writing course.
How stupid. Teachers need to spend less time on knit-picking and more time on teaching. What is this- measuring class? How ’bout we expand students minds for a change instead of trying to make them into robots.
it’s not stupid. what’s stupid is that our teachers get criticized for being strict, but when students don’t learn the get told they are bad teachers. Have you heard the way some our 30 year old elementary and middle school teachers speak? some of them should be required to go back and take English classes again!!! and this is coming from a person who’s first language was NOT English. Leniency should not be expected in our middle and high schools, and it should be banned in all our higher learning institutions.
*It’s
*What’s
*they
*of
*Some
*And
*whose
I realize English is your second language, but I had to point out the irony. :)
Also, it should be pointed out that the post was not about a teacher being nit-picky about grammar. It’s about them being nit-picky over less than 1/16th of an inch, which could easily be attributed to printer settings.
the point still stands. if you can read this post and find that many errors, and you aren’t an English teacher; you should know that your college professor will find anything and everything there is to find. especially if specific instructions were given.
PS. i should probably do this from my desktop and not my phone. less errors. :)~
I’m far from an English teacher. I did grow up with a mother who’s a grammar Nazi. I now correct her grammar. It’s awesome. :)
I also occasionally correct the grammar of random strangers on the internet. That’s not nearly as awesome. :(
Fewer errors.
:-)
*fewer errors
Here’s a better suggestion: how “’bout” we focus on making our posessives’ punctuation correct? Or spelling properly? I don’t mean to NIT-pick at your post, but if you’re going to complain about what teachers do wrong, perhaps you should first be sure that you learned to do things the correct way.
hello captain obvious. someone just pointed that out. WOW.
SORRY SORRY!!! i totally see this was not for me!!! SORRY!
I would completely understand if it were smaller the other direction – I certainly made my margins a tiny fraction of an inch too big once or twice in college in hopes that I wouldn’t have to write as much. But for it to be this much too SMALL, which means they wrote MORE, tells me it was probably the printer.
I HAVE taught college-level English, and I have never even checked the margins. I couldn’t care less whether a student met the page-length, point size, or anything else. It takes too much time to actually read a student’s essay or research paper, and provide genuine constructive feedback, to bother with that crap. These are the teachers who need to find other work.
Yes, but this doesn’t look like an English class. It’s a scientific paper, and, as someone else pointed out, APA is VERY strict.
Yeah. I have taught college English and had some real hard-ass colleagues, but I never encountered this degree of OCD among them. If this is a science paper, I agree with those who say this tiny departure from format perfection falls within the margins–sorry–of printer differences. Also, this is crazy.
Yeah… I’d say most of the people who are saying “science calls for precision!” don’t know any actual scientists. In actual science there are these things called “tolerances”.
If you look at the text of the paper, you see a few words to suggest it’s a science (oscilla…) paper also involving some specific measurements (grams, e.g.). Maybe getting the pargins precise was one of the prof’s requirements in determining how the paper would be graded (thinking that if you screw up something that basic even by a minuscule amount, the science behind your report might also not have received the attention to detail he or she demanded.) I’d cut the prof some slack, especially if the 1″ margins were included in the requirements of the paper. As it is, it looks like the writer only lost one of the 20 available marks for that question — or even better, 1/20 of a mark. No big deal and next time the writer will may more attention to the report criteria so it’s a win/win all around.
Having written extensively in APA, I say with confidence that APA is NOT a 32nd of an inch strict. Journals can do their own editing, though papers must be properly formatted in headers, footers references, and citations. This professor clearly has some minutiae of a beef to pick. This IS ridiculous.
I’d like to see the margin on the other side as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were a 32nd of an inch too big, which would suggest the inaccurate margins were a simple matter of the paper not being lined up in the printer quite perfectly. I’d also like to see a measurement of the full width of the paper… I just picked up a random sheet of 8.5×11 paper, and found it was actually only 8 and 7/16 inches across, a full 16th of an inch smaller the advertised 8.5 inches. And if the paper were perfectly centered in the printer, that 16th of an inch difference would translate to a 32nd of an inch missing from each side. Unless the student made his own paper, such an error is clearly not his fault.
However, I’d also like to know what size margins were actually required. While the notes on the page certainly could be interpreted as “your margins are slightly smaller than the required one inch,” they could also be interpreted as “your margins are approximately one inch, instead of the required size” (such 1.5″ or 0.5″). While a 32nd of an inch is likely to be printer error, half an inch, or even a quarter of an inch is probably not.
But that said, I once had a professor who actually made me go back through my paper, and delete a space from between every sentence, because APA style required a single space rather than two spaces (this might have been a good learning experience in that I would probably never have made that mistake again, except that before the next time I had to write in APA style, the new APA manual came out, and one of the changes was that it did allow two spaces between sentences), and even she never measured my margins, although I don’t doubt she would have had they been off by a noticeable amount. Then again, she usually had us turn in papers electronically, so she could have seen exactly what the margins were anyway.
My sister was asked once by her college prof to DUMB DOWN her essays… when she refused he docked her for writing at too high a level…
That may make sense depending on the purpose. It is good to be able to write at the reading level of one’s intended audience. For example, the authors of children’s textbooks do not write at the same level as those of high school and college. He may have had a valid reason. Then again, he may not have.
I went through the same thing. I ended up writing TWO essays. One I was happy with and one that “met the requirements of the paper with precision and succinctness” Seriously….
What part of 1-inch do they not understand?
“Hey Prof–If you’re going to be a margin nazi, at least dot your i so you don’t look like an idiot.”
Maybe it was a typing class….then it would definitely matter
Teachers need to enforce strictness, otherwise you have a bunch of whiners who don’t follow the rules. What if the student was drawing up arichet
…architectural plans? Shortcomings add up. So follow the rules and stop whining about it!
Yes, because when you print out a blueprint at 1:1 it matches the real world down to the tolerances necessary for engineering purposes. All those numbers and decimal points are just for decoration.
Why such a wide line above the O on the ruler?.Should have used the thinner 1 inch line and measured to the thinner 2 inch line…It would still be off,but not as much.The ruler is flawed. The science teacher is using a flawed (open for interpretation) measuring device.
Following the directions is as important as the test itself.
Wow, the teacher/TA responses are disturbing. What’s important is good writing, clear writing, critical thought, and creative thought. Stick the ruler up your buttocks, please.
Prof is also not measuring correctly with the ruler that is being used.
It is a ‘centering rule’, and the prof is measuring from the wrong edge of the zero line, he needs to place the margin exactly in the center of the zero mark – which is clearly wider than the other graduations on the rule.
Does not know how to correctly measure -1 point from Slytherin.
That guy has a dirty finger.
Honestly, it’s basic following directions, and why the hell would your default margins be changed from 1″ anyway? The only thing dumber than chaning the margins was whining about getting tagged for it.
Submit a manuscript to an agent or publisher with nonstandard margins and expect to get rejected for signalling that you’ll be hard to work with because you are a special snowflake and standards are for other people.
What is shocking is the number of education professionals that seem to think this kind of lunacy represents good practice, and that a 0.14% margin discrepancy is THE SAME THING as turning in a double length paper.