Tutorial Reports

This is slightly off-topic, but I'd say it relates in a sort of tangential way. You remember that example from the Grice reading about the person applying for a philosophy job (p.52)? Well, it really cracked me up, thinking back to my year at Oxford last year. (From that paragraph alone, I guessed that Grice was an Oxonian, and sure enough, Wikipedia agrees).

At Oxford, the degree and scoring systems work differently than they do in the States. For instance, "cumulative GPA" and "semester grades" are totally bewildering concepts to Oxford students, who think along lines of tutorials and papers (not papers like essays, papers as in final-final exam papers at the end of your 3 years). My grades from Oxford are conversions of my term tutorial reports. To the best of my knowledge, tutors' tutorial reports are generally brief, brutally honest synopses of a student's work during that term. But when I read my first set, it was slightly startling to see all my work evaluated in three sentences like: "Caitlin completed all her written work to a good standard. She showed up at all the scheduled tutorials prepared and spoke well on the assigned material. She needs to do more critical listening," or something like that (I wish I had the exact text because it was even less positive and more ambivalent than that). A whole semester ND grade had to be determined based on that! (no wonder my GPA dropped...) But in the Oxford system, tutorial reports don't usually count for anything. They are just used internally to gauge students' progress. When I asked my tutors how I was doing and what in my work could be improved, they just said that I was doing well enough and seemed confused that I thought the content of my tutorial report implied that I was doing poorly. They told me that if my work were lacking, they would say that explicitly in my tutorial report.

By the end of the year, I was getting more positive adjectives in my tutorial reports--I wonder whether my work really got better or they realized that Americans expect more laudatory language and were adjusting my reports for the different purpose they served in my case. In any case, this is an example of a time when differences in convention led me to imply something different than what my tutor intended. [Throughout the year, I was rather uncertain of the expectations for me-- and my tutors were uncertain of what I wanted and needed to learn-- and my ND department had trouble figuring out how to credit the work I did towards my degree... yeah, it was a fun year]

Now I'm asking one of my tutors for a letter of recommendation, and I hope he has more good things to say about me than Grice's philosophy tutor...


And I'll do another post later on the reading for Mon.