Defects 101

An English professor at a community college in New York City argues, by analogy with contentions made by the neurologist Oliver Sacks about some of his patients, that the testing his university system uses to evaluate his students' writing is only good at exposing deficiencies, not strengths; he claims that students write under constraints that no professor or professional writer would accept. He concludes that it is less important for his students to satisfy mandated rubrics than to satisfy his own rigorous responses as a professional and devoted reader of literature.