Why I disagreed with my students who said, “That was easy!”

Today three different students made some variation of that statement.

In that class, we are gearing up to write a research paper. I have broken the project up into multiple tasks, that I can grade quickly and generously.

Today’s assignment asks students to submit a paragraph that argues the “con” position, and some students happily recalled that last week I asked them to reflect on the quotes they collected from scholars who disagree with each other. Another student who was worried about something labeled “bibliography assignment” was relieved to see the task merely involved formatting information he had already gathered.

The students who didn’t put the time in on the earlier assignments won’t be able to breeze through the next steps in the sequence.

“What you just did was *not* easy,” I said. “But you did the prep, so you were ready for it.”