I’ve read the paper and it is indeed garbage. However, I’ve also read the rubric, and per the rubric it should not have been a zero. The student write mostly coherently and had somewhat of an argument, and was clearly responding to a prompt about a personal response to the article. I think the grader is overstepping here. But, we don’t know any further context on if this has been something ongoing and student has been warned before, or something else.
What does strike me as very odd is that there are ZERO citations in the paper.
This was being discussed elsewhere but it seems to warrant a low grade (or very low grade) and a conversation instead of a zero.
Would that have avoided the entire controversy? Who knows. The culture wars are everywhere any more and neoliberalization of education turns it into a commodity of certification instead of places of learning.
What’s sad is that you’re not wrong, but the quality of university writing has degraded so much that just writing something mostly coherent is fairly good. It’s in some ways a breath of fresh air from the monotonous tone of LLMs that we get for every assignment.
Also, I think it’s just a short article reflection and not a paper. The rubric made it seem like it was a short assignment.