Manybooks’s Reviews > Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students > Status Update

Someone lent this to me years ago - a friend of the author. I thought it was sadly hilarious.

I know, one eye laughing, one eye crying. I guess, I can understand mistakes made on exams to a point, but term papers??

We had a couple of student papers we used to pass around the history grad school office, when we were bored, to amuse us.

My favorite was the "steel pipes" essay. A student in one section had claimed the Roman Empire fell because they used too much steel piping in their aqueducts.

Were these graduate students or undergraduate students? A friend who teaches anthropology at college got an essay once that kept mentioning the James Bakery. It turned out the student was referring to the James Bay Cree, a Quebec First Nations people adversely affected by hydroelectric development on James Bay. I guess the student heard James Bakery when my friend was lecturing and only used his/her own notes for the term paper.

We were grad students, they were undergrads.

I remember marking first and second year German grammar exams with other graduate students. In some cases, a wrong preposition can change the whole meaning of a sentence, sometimes with hilarious results. There was one exam question, where the students were to write that the woman is going to the children (Die Frau geht zu den Kindern). One student, though, wrote: Die Frau geht an die Kinder. And, that sentence could sort of mean that the woman is physically attacking, going against the children.