to dream the impossible dream…

i was just wondering…how hard is it to get 90s in humanities? impossible?


how hard is it to get 90s in humanities? HARD. harder than getting 3-in-a-row in one of those carnival basketball games (frakking carnies rig it!) harder than fighting a bear and winning. in fact, team aska would suggest you devote such insane aspirations to something a little more attainable, like seducing a movie star or getting a juno award for ‘best new Canadian album’. yes, it may be that you are coming into university with a 96 percent highschool average, and we’re not saying you didn’t earn that…just that highschool marks are inflated to a degree that you don’t see here. in fact, dr. team aska feels you could be at high-risk for the midterm freakout that many new students go through after getting their first university marks back and finding out that C’s and D’s are the name of the game.

when checking different marking rubrics like this one , what they describe as being 90+ level doesn’t sound that unattainable, but talking to professors yields another story. if you do an extremely well thought out brilliantly creative perfectly executed paper and there are no flaws whatsoever, that’s in the 85 range. in the GPA sense, that’s 4.0 which is as good as it gets. marks of 90 or higher are reserved for absolute genius-range material; a mark of 100% on an upper-year essay would mean you are the definitive scholar in your field and your work should be published all over the world. one professor I spoke to said that in more than 15 years as a professor, he gave a mark of 90 or higher for an essay only once. figures-wise, about 2-3% of humanities students are pulling 90+ averages.

if you’re still going to try to push 90s in humanities (if you’re such a hard worker, shouldn’t you be in life sci anyways?) , aska does have some tips:
-go to the writing centre at least 2 times per essay. a couple of sessions will generally bump up any essay a full letter grade
-take easier courses that aren’t as dependent on academic essays. semiotics instead of philosophy.
-make appointments with professors and TAs to discuss the assignments and get their feedback on your ideas.
-don’t think you’ll be doing a lot of partying

if you are going to ever hit that magically 90land, it could potentially be in first year. aska got a 90 on a final exam writing an essay on a play that I had partially read 5 hours prior. a sibling of aska got 97 on an essay for that same class. so if you’re too stuck-up to learn to love those C’s, take drama: form and style.