The Ass in the Assignment

By Sidra Rizvi

Trying to kill the hours before the class starts I cannot help but catch the juicy scraps of conversations that are picked up by my ears from my immediate surroundings. On one such encounter I came across a frantic woman telling her friend how she was doomed because the teacher had given her a 15 page assignment to write on. The friend tried to comfort her by telling her to explore the incredible world of internet. To which the poor soul replied that her internet connection has been disbanded for a while so she had to write it by hand. An expression of pure horror was now etched on the friend’s face and indeed everyone within the earshot immediately sympathised with the ill-fated young woman. Writing a 15 page assignment by hand is an achievement deserving the ‘ultimate perseverance award’.

From the beginning of the first semester teachers prepare us students to start making a 15-20 page assignment that holds 20 marks in the total percentage. The subject whether Islamiat or Urdu or even Maths , we are asked to kindly bring our assignments on the day of the final exam or else…!

The assignments themselves are very interesting. Mostly when teachers do not feel like teaching a particular topic they ask the students to gather up information on it themselves as their ‘assignments’. Or if the teachers really are in the mood they ask us to write a three, four page essay over why who did what.

My most memorable assignment is that of Urdu. The teacher asked us to take any Urdu writer as a topic and discuss his work. The day before the assignment was due I cried and begged and pleaded my father to help me with it. He kept telling me to write it and he’ll help me correct it. In the end he gave up and wrote most of the thing himself. As a punishment from God Almighty by the time he was finished with it, it was almost 3 am and my already drooped eyelids could not even figure out what he had written. In the end utterly disgusted with myself I handed in the miserable piece of paper I called an assignment and gave it to the teacher. It’s a miracle I passed. Thinking over this incident I realized that the ‘ass’ in the entire assignment saga was me. I didn’t learn a word. I kept cursing the poor writer all night for making my life miserable. I believe at one point I even sang a song titled ‘How could you be so heartless’ which depicted my exact situation.

However I am clearly not alone. The university is full of other ‘asses’ like me. These assignments that are so frowned upon are not even harvested from our own ‘fields’. We steal them from the neighbouring farms (read internet). We don’t know a word of what is written in these thick thick bundles of paper we proudly file and hand out to the teachers. We don’t even have a clue of what the question asks us. Religious as we are we just close our eyes, take God’s name and copy paste everything onto our blank ‘ms word’. Websites like ‘google’, ‘wikipedia’, ‘about’ etc become the formerly popular ‘pencil’ used to fill empty the paper. At times we asses of these assignments also do not even care to remove the citations or the links present in the original articles. With just a click of the mouse we the real ‘rats’ are able to complete the entire assignment in minutes. Considering how everything is handed out to us on a silver platter, students still fail to come up with them on time is beyond my comprehension.

The general attitude is who would read anyway. The teacher has over a hundred students. How many copies will he/she read? This is true to an extent. Don’t teach; don’t learn is the motto everyone adopts upon entering the university. With this attitude it is not wonder we are plagued by diseases like ‘fake degrees’ and ‘plagiarism’.