Can't I just write what I know in my research paper?

It's that time of the semester again, where I have to resist the urge to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. Yep. Research papers.

The fun part about grading research papers when your school does the Graduation Project is that about 80% of the time, I have no idea if the content of what the student is writing is actually accurate unless I want to take the time to cross check what they're talking about. This happens, oh...never. But sometimes it's pretty easy to spot when they are a: full of shit and/or b: using shit for resources and/or c: clearly writing while under the influence of something that high school students should not be consuming.

Exhibit A: This student's paper is supposed to be about the positive influences that youth ministries have on teens. She does at one point mention missionaries, but then she talks more about youth groups. Without any editing (other than not including the citation she had included at the end...I wouldn't want to embarrass her source), here is one of the paragraphs in her paper.

Africa and AIDS have become almost synonymous. There are a lot of problems like diets and nutrition need to be improved, men and women and children all need health education, and child mortality rates need improving. The missionaries of Africa look upon all of the help and the grace of God they can confront, but there are hundred more like this and the missionaries of Africa is such many steps, unassumingly.

To be honest, I wasn't sure how to comment on her paper without completely crushing her soul, so I just wrote that it felt unrelated and I wasn't sure what she was saying. Here are some of the things I would have liked to say, however.

1. A continent and a disease should never be anything remotely close to being synonymous, for a number of rather valid reasons, not the least of which being that if you were to go to the doctor, they would be unlikely to be able to treat you fro Africa.
2. I don't think you ever want mortality rates to improve. At the very least, this is a somewhat insensitive way to suggest that there is an overpopulation problem.
3. I'm not terribly religious, but I'm pretty sure confronting God generally doesn't end well. I mean, look at what happened to Lucifer...
4. The last part of that paragraph broke my brain with its utter lack of intelligibility.

Exhibit B: This student's topic is "How the Evolution of Web Pages has Inform the Public."
The title alone warns you of fun to come. The first sentence set the pace for the rest of it, as well. He opened with, "Webpage design is a new concept that has been around ever since the 1990's, but over the past few years, webpage design has expanded enough for it to be considered an actual career."

Um. Unless you're talking about periods in the formation of the earth, I don't really think you can call something 20 years old a "new concept." The paper kind of went downhill from there. Not that it was a long trip, considering the starting point.

Exhibit C: This next paper was supposed to be about the mental, emotional, and social effects of chemotherapy. Really, it was more a completely disorganized collection of miscellaneous statements about cancer treatment and strangely worded stories about cancer patients. Here are a few examples of things that she wrote, that, while they did not all come from the same paragraph, would make the same amount of sense put into a single "paragraph" as the rest of the paper did.

Since standard treatments have been proven very effective, chemotherapy should be as well.

I have no idea what "standard treatments" are for cancer, though I know enough to know that "very effective" is unfortunately not something we can put as a blanket label on all of them. I do know that just because one thing is effective, it doesn't mean something completely different from it automatically will be...

Families everywhere have certain problems, however chemotherapy has a strong impact on them in most cases. A boy named Alex had to make difficult decisions between having cancer and going back to school.

Sounds like a tough decision for this kid. Gee, let me see...go to school, or have cancer. Tough one. I should save this as an example of how wording things carefully really does matter.

If a family member were in this position my family experiencing depression from cancer medications , but try to fix things to the best of ability.

I...I just don't know here. I can't even make fun of it, because I have no clue what it's supposed to say.

Perhaps the scariest thing, however, is that with the conversion scale that the district has given us for the rubrics we are required to use, all of the papers I've quoted here ended up with a passing grade. This, quite honestly, frightens me more than a little.