Euro-centric capitalists individualism spurs a kind of competition in academic circles best captured in the process or review and evaluation. Rather than note strengths, this form of academic 'critique' is all about finding fault.

The 'thrust and parry' of debate say some, the mindless evisceration say I.

I once did an undergraduate course with the late Douglas Cole. I wrote a really bad paper (a C+ or B- at best). The T.A. gave it a D. This was the only time I every complained about a grade.

I'm just going to say it, the paper was bad. It was a simplistic marxist analysis of Canadian multiculturalism. I realized that it wasn't the bad paper, it was the marxism that bothered the TA. I first complained to them. They sent me to the prof.

Prof Cole was very direct. He sat me down in his office and very carefully went through my paper point out every single error. From poor typing bad spelling, problematic sentences, logical faults, awkward word choice - you name it, he called it.

The coup de grace was his rumination that a D was generous.

I recall my thoughts as though it were just this morning. We were in his office looking out of SFU's A.Q. into the court yard. It was a nice day.

I paused, and then looked at him and said 'you should be able to dissemble this paper, but what I was asking for was consistency in assessment, not a lesson in how bad my work is.'

My own approach ever since has been to think as carefully as I can about what is the message of critique, what is the objective of evaluation. If I am assessing a grant application do I really need to find every single fault I can think of? Who does that really help?

That is why I am interested in strength based assessments. What is working in this piece (this file). Where are the strong points. What would benefit from further development, how might we do that?

Dr. Cole and his TA taught me an important lesson about assessment and the pedagogy of care, even if that wasn't the lesson they had intended..

[oh, and the final grade for the course I received was higher then if they simply added it all up ... I guess they conceded in the only way they knew without telling me to my face]