This is not one of those posts.
Sooner or later, every year, I hear someone say something about making slight, seemingly imperceptible changes to the typeface to make an essay seem just long enough. Why use font size 12 when 13 will remove a line or two on every page? Why have inch margins when a tenth and an inch will shorten those lines?
Well, there's a lot of reasons why not.
For starters, there's the issues addressed in the post “Why The Page Count?” to explain the logic behind a page requirement. I'm not going to rehash those here. Ultimately, maintaining the typeface isn't a matter of assignment requirements: it's a matter of trust and respect.
In my own experience, my first year teaching consisted of 4 courses of about 20 students writing 15 typed pages each: 1200 total typed pages. The next year, 5 courses of 20 students writing 20 typed pages: 2000 total. Now I was just a graduate student, I wouldn’t be surprised if full-time professors, after a decade of teaching, have graded as many as 30,000 typed pages.
So I wonder what goes through student's heads when they triple space an essay, or set the margins on the left and right to be an inch and a quarter rather than just an inch. Thinking an instructor won't pick up on alterations to the typeface is like expecting a golfer to not know the difference between woods and irons.
When a student does this it shatters, literally breaks, whatever trust and confidence the instructor had in them. It is cheating. It is a student assuming the rules and expectations instructors establish don’t apply to them. I stress to my students that this is important not just because it’s an arbitrary standard, but because it keeps grading fair. Having a page formatted with 1.25 inch margins instead of 1 inch can increase the length of an essay by about 1/7th. Almost 15%. That is, in terms of grading, the difference between an A- and a C+. Should a project be accepted when it openly skirts around 15% of the work?
So what if someone forgets? I’m open to this possibility and I’ve seen it happen, but it usually depends on the circumstances of the situation. I had a student once who, after a great track record made one significant formatting mistake late in the semester after having done theretofore pristine work. We discussed the issue, the student revised, resubmitted, and all was well. Lesson learned.
Sometimes, though, even drumming and hammering the lesson won’t do. I’ve had students submit every essay incorrectly formatted. I reminded them in the feedback. I plead with them indirectly when addressing the class, and some still didn’t fix it. My approach in these situations was simple: if after weeks and months of my instruction and feedback, a student still has not figured out the need to change the typeface it really makes me wonder what they learned. Forgetfulness is one thing, but at this point, it’s negligence.
It upsets me when people suggest doing this so flippantly, but more so when people actually do it. Take the length specifications seriously. Skimming on the length of an essay is not too different from, say, ignoring test questions and expecting the instructor just to ignore them when grading. Most of all, though, this is disrespectful to peers: those who did the work, who filled their pages and followed directions. I rigidly teach formatting not because I’m obsessed with it, nor because students need to know MLA or APA or Chicago, but because it keeps grading fair. It keeps everyone’s three, five, or ten pages the same three, five, or ten pages. But insisting four pages is indeed five, is a deception, a lie, and a blatant act of disrespect to instructors and peers.
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