WTF... a RANT. better skip it if you're not in the mood...

OK.  Now I'm pissed.  How many hours did I invest into that stupid, er- highly enlightened paper on The Black Plague?  Well, I don't need to do the math.  Let's just say "many".  Many many nights I stayed up past bedtime working and reworking, rewriting and correcting... until it was as perfect as I could make it.  I re-wrote, finessed, fought with images to make sure they were visually interesting...  15 pages of text, 9 works cited, 8 images imbedded, 5 discussion questions at the end, 1 cover page thoughtfully produced.  Yes, I did a lot of work... so our teacher "publishes" all the papers for our peer review, which is part of our grade.  

SO...  I opened the first one and start to read.  "King Arthur led a veried life...";  the next one, 4 pages poorly written in first person with 2 different tenses; the next one 5 pages with ONE reference cited; the next one, I looked up the cite and guess what- it's all plagiarized.  No, really- word for word.  I was tempted to call her out on it, but I'm not.  The prof will figure it out the same way I did, she pasted two things together that just don't match.  I swear... by now I'm a little bit freaking out because I spent 2 weeks writing a major paper and if you use mine to compare with these other papers, they're all D's.  

I'm serious, one girl, who's name is SPECIAL, so that should be a clue, wrote a TWO page paper.  TWO.  ~gasp~  No cover.  No title.  No "discussion" questions which was part of the assignment.  (part that took me HOURS to figure out).  How am I supposed to review that with any positive comments when I spent so much time working on mine?  Ok, perhaps I just don't understand college these days.  I thought the purpose was to get an A.  As it turns out, it's to just do as little as possible and get passing grade.

Ironically, I had JUST commented to someone today that I thought my project was only worth a B in my own grading scale.  I amend that.  My paper is F'ing genius.  It's BRILLIANT.  No WONDER the prof sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago thanking me for my insightful paper on some topic or another.  Ok.  Off to read the next 6 papers and "review them".  I guess I need to cut them all some slack.... or not.  I really want to e-mail the prof and say, "I spent 2 weeks, 4 hours a night researching and writing my paper... WTF is all this?  Fail them all!"  

Maybe the next 6 are good.  Maybe they're enlightened.  Maybe... just maybe...