Today I read a paragraph that was so bad that I actually got mad at the student who wrote it. Luckily that student wasn’t around.

The paragraph in question was part of a course I teach that prepares students to go overseas. My job is to read, mark and assign a mark to the paragraph and then follow a complicated online system to return the document to the students.

The trouble is, sometimes the students use online translators. They enter entire sentences in Japanese, translate it into English, then send it on as original work. The problem is that translators, at this point in their development are mostly crap. The English ends up semi-coherent, if the student is lucky, or incoherent. Today’s sentences were so bad I couldn’t figure out what the student was trying to say which meant I couldn’t fix it.

I added a lot of marginal comments and an angry note.

Next week I’ll check his first, when I’m still feeling patient and generous.