Lecturers should do their own assignments

The more I re-engage with education as a student, the more I realise lecturers really need to stop marking assignments until they've actually tried doing those assignments themselves.

I recently had an assignment (an annotated bibliography) graded and given back to me, and for pretty much everyone of my lecturer's comments I had the following response¹:

"Yes, I know, I thought of that, too - but there was this word limit, you see, and I couldn't fit that in without leaving something else out."

I played it out fairly evenly across the board - I left some things out of one entry and left different things out of another.  She noticed every single oversight.

I have a feeling that, had she had to do that assignment within those limitations, she would have missed out on important pieces of information as well.

But, as she was marking the assignment, not writing it, she was in a position to see the limitations in my answer, rather than the limitations imposed by the question.

At least the question was a reasonable assessment task to begin with.

At the reference desk of an academic library, I often see students come for help trying to answer really, really stupid assignment questions.  A surprisingly large part of my job involves helping students compensate for bad assessment design.

There should be a rule somewhere that states a lecturer cannot set an assignment for students until after he or she has satisfactorily completed it him/herself.


1. Not that I actually "responded".  Giving feedback on an assessment piece or its mark isn't done - although I'm sure there's something to be gained from it.