Not only that — apparently professors often care more about grammar and spelling than they do content.

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed has the story:

Study examines professors’ writing assignments for students

Professors sometimes bemoan their students’ writing skills. But how good are professors at creating quality writing assignments? There’s no recent, national study of how and what professors are asking their students to write, despite lots of research suggesting that rich, varied writing assignments and opportunities for feedback mean better student papers. A new book seeks to fill that data void, and argues that what professors are asking their students to write is as important as what students end up writing.

“Writing assignments are revealing classroom artifacts,” says Dan Melzer, reading and writing coordinator at California State University at Sacramento in his book, Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (Utah State University Press). “I would argue that writing assignments […] are as rich a source of data about college writing as instructor comments or student papers” – and Assignments provides what Melzer calls a “macro-level view” of those tasks.

Melzer’s study, conducted over the course of a decade, sought to replicate and improve upon a British study of postsecondary writing assignments in the 1970s. He analyzed some 2,100 writing assignments for humanities, business and social and natural sciences courses at 100 U.S. colleges and universities. The sample excludes assignments from courses focused exclusively on writing. The book’s analysis isn’t the whole picture of undergraduate writing, he says, but the data set – taken from assignments posted on the internet – is a pretty good sketch.

For each assignment, Melzer noted its “rhetorical situation” (discipline speak for purpose and audience); genre; and “discourse community” (classroom setting). The story the data tell is “sometimes disheartening, sometimes encouraging, and hopefully always instructive to composition instructors,” he says.

First, the bad news: Most of the assignments were limited in purpose. Two-thirds asked students to inform the reader – overwhelmingly the “professor-as-examiner” – about details from a lecture or reading. While there was a good deal of exploratory writing (13 percent of the sample), poetic and purely expressive writing were “almost nonexistent.” Surprisingly to Melzer, that finding was consistent across institution types and course levels. One example of this type of question is “From my outline on earthquakes, explain the ‘effects of earthquakes.’ ” There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that question on its own, but it’s a problem if a student is never asked to write any other kind of paper for any other kind of audience, Melzer argues.