Profrauder of Film

I am a college student, and I am in a film class. I have to have some type of class from some category that includes film for my degree. Everyone has it. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for requiring a class that has nothing to do with most fields, but that's not what I'm angry about right at this moment.

It's generally a pretty easy class. I have it twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, for an hour and twenty minutes in the afternoon. There's a fairly steady routine that the class has followed these first two months I've been in it. We get an assignment to write an essay about a film by the next week, we watch the film, then we talk about the film and turn in our essays.

The last paper I wrote had to answer two questions about the film Double Indemnity. First, why the film was a good example of film noir, and second, how the characters fit Mulvey's theory of films, mainly that they're male oriented among other things.

Always on these assignments, the professor stresses somewhere that we are not to restate the question, just to answer it. I figure that makes sense: we're college students and she's a professor. She knows what were talking about because she asked the flipping question. I'm always careful to avoid anything close to restating the question, even, in this case, the word "noir." I just explained why it fit.

I got a 78 percent. That's much too low for my liking. Firstly because my other papers were higher and I need good grades for a scholarship, and secondly because I know for a fact that I thoroughly answered the question. It was two pages long, per the assignment. The remark on it that I assume contributed to most of the deduction was that she "didn't understand the point of the second paragraph." Well, that was the largest paragraph, telling why the characters were all film noir characters. I was going to confront the professor and change that ridiculous grade if I could. I should have gotten at least a low A, since I fully answered the question. As a side note, to emphasize my irritation with this class, I knew for a fact the guy in front of me made a higher grade on the last paper than me, and he didn't watch the film.

I started by asking, after class, if the grades were final. She seemed confused, and a little irritate, and said that they were. She told me if I had a problem that I should talk to her. "Her" was the girl helping with the tests that day.

I humored her and explained my issue. She said that I had to be more specific. That was all.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I've established that I deserved a better grade because it wasn't a bad paper. Granted, that was subjective, but that was just the issue, it being subjective.

What made me angriest is that the PROFESSOR who I am paying to teach me this useless topic because the school requires it, doesn't even do the work to read the answers to HER assignments. I could understand that with math or science when there is only one answer, but film papers are so subjective. She even emphasized herself that the papers didn't have to say the same thing since it was analysis.

And just another side note, it seems to me that this matter of professors letting other people grade their students work could be compared to plagiarism.

Now if I have an issue in that class, I know that I CAN NOT count on the professor to help me with it, because she doesn't even see what her students are doing.

Thank you for reading.