I've seen and experienced so many students who seem beyond help or are simply apathetic to their situation that I wanted to share a quick story of success.

I recently graded the semester-long assignment for my course, that was broken into three sections with drafts due throughout the semester. The paper was a digital marketing campaign proposal.

The drafts of the first section were ROUGH. This was just a foundational step where they were selecting the company, doing secondary research on what the company was already doing, and stating their overall goals for the project. The students not only didn't cite any sources, their logic was flawed in their conclusions/arguments. They were stating conjecture as fact, and didn't understand why what they were stating was conjecture.

They called my criticism harsh, and that I was expecting too much of them compared to their other classes.

These are graduate students in their final semester of an MBA program, and none of them had ever heard of internal citations or a works cited page before. Some of the students are from Europe and laughably claimed that in Europe citations weren't necessary.

I was more in shock than anything. I thought they were just too far behind to catch up to a reasonable level for graduate students. But, I was going to try my best.

I gave a 30 minute lesson on citing sources. I gave another 30 minute lesson on how to structure an argument for a paper, and how they should be using the information they learn in their secondary research to form arguments about what the company is currently doing so that they could make their suggestions. I wrote an example paper showing them what adequate secondary research looked like and how that research could be used to draw conclusions and make suggestions.

The drafts for the second and third sections were much improved compared to their first section draft, so I could see improvement along the way.

When grading their final aggregated papers I had their final version on one monitor with the rubric and their draft of each section with the same rubric on the other monitor. In doing this comparison to see what they changed to meet the rubric requirements I was astonished at how far they'd come throughout the semester. Their final papers could easily pass for professional work.

I'm so proud of my students and their willingness to try improving themselves. I've had my fair share of students only there for the grade and degree, so this was a breath of fresh air.

Maybe this'll give some hope to a professor out there in the same place I was in the beginning of the semester staring at the papers wondering how the students had made it this far with that level of work. Keep your head up, it's worth it, there are students who care.