Can handwriting affect grades?

Ron603

My english teacher keeps telling us that the examiner will mark you down if your handwriting is 'bad'. Personally I think that this is ridiculous, everybody has their own handwriting style. She insists on using block letters rather than joined or cursive. I do agree that it's quicker and easier to read, but I was taught to join my letters in primary school and that 'typed' letters were wrong. Is this possible? Can you get marked down for bad handwriting?

smcgiff

How bad is your handwriting. Mine is terrible and since I 've learned to touch type hand writing the simplest things feels strange.

My handwriting is hieroglyphics bad.

If yours is very bad then it will affect your grades, not because its bad writing, but because it's eligible. If a marker cannot read it they cannot award you marks. You might study for months, take a three hour exam only for it to be marked by a bored examiner in 5 minutes. They'll not delay too long to discover if what you have written is genius.

spurious

The examiners will be experienced teachers (usually) and have seen all sorts of handwriting. That said, if it's impossible to work out what the words are, you won't get any marks.

I had a paper once where the writing looked like this:
___ _ _ _____ __ _ __ ________ __ _ . ___ _ _ _ _ _

I could not tell one letter, let alone one word. It got no marks.

doolox

There was a time when cursive handwriting was seen as the mark of an experienced and cultured student, usually middle class, and that blocked letters were seen as uncultured, juvenile and the mark of a semi educated person and so to be avoided by anyone who wished to portray thenselves as civilised, educated and worthy of being taken seriuosly as an authority in their field.

Since most written reports and correspondance is now done on electronic media and there is very little hand written stuff done in the workplace or in higher level academic circles, joined handwriting is not as important as it once was. I see many people, including my two daughters, under 30 use blocked letters in their handwriting. The only place I see extensive handwriting done is in school and once people go to uni it seems that all the written stuff is submitted on wordprocessed documents of one kind or another.

I see that nurses etc still have a lot of hand written reports to do but these are mostly form filling and data recording with terse paragraphs and brief descriptions being the limit to the writing involved.

While good handwriting is an advantage in making the material clearly understandable to an examiner and may tweak a certain percentage upwards, if the material is sparse and inadequate no amount of fancy handwriting will make up for lack of knowledge or wrong answers.

It appears that modern technology may have rendered good penmanship not as important as it once was.

spurious

Mind you, for someone who is embarrassed by their bad handwriting, if there is no physical reason for it, it's quite easy to correct.

Roquentin

my handwriting is like mandarin........if they cant read it they cant mark it......i think though they pick out a section that they can read and mark that (i could be wrong)

VG31

Ron603 wrote: »

I was taught to join my letters in primary school and that 'typed' letters were wrong. Is this possible?

In primary school we were made to use joined handwriting. As soon as I went to secondary school I stopped immediately and have never joined my letters since. I find joined writing difficult to read sometimes and a lot of the time I think non-joined writing looks better (except if the joined writing is very neat).

Ron603

I include a scanned page from my notes copy with my handwriting for you to judge if it's legible or not. Just add http:// before it.

tinypic.com/r/243m5n5/8

smcgiff

Ron603 wrote: »

I include a scanned page from my notes copy with my handwriting for you to judge if it's legible or not. Just add http:// before it.

tinypic.com/r/243m5n5/8

Assuming this is typical and picked at random it seems quite legible, there's better, but imagine there's worse too.

BTW, your teacher is giving you this advice to help you. They'll have a better idea if your normal writing will be a hindrance to you getting marks.

TimeToShine

Your writing is fine but I can imagine it takes a turn for the worse under exam conditions with the time constraints and pressure.

In my opinion I think you should just ignore your teacher. They aren't the be all and end all, and this one in particular is talking out of their rear-end if they are implying that you will lose marks for bad writing (provided it isn't completely illegible).

robjones1981

Ron603 wrote: »

I include a scanned page from my notes copy with my handwriting for you to judge if it's legible or not. Just add http:// before it.

tinypic.com/r/243m5n5/8

Perfectly legible

spurious

There would be no problem with that handwriting at all. It's perfectly legible.
Really, you should see the state of some of them.

Bazinga_N

Just as a side note, if you were looking to improve your handwriting you could try using one of those handwriting books we all had to spend hours on in primary. An hour a night, over a few weeks and surely you'd notice an improvement? Might be worth a try anyways!

Something like these:
https://www.schoolbooks.ie/596110-1241-0-%7CEducate.ie%7CJust_Handwriting_-_4th_Class
https://www.schoolbooks.ie/23849-1241-0-%7CFolens%7CWrite_Here_H_-_4th_Class_%28Cursive_Style%29
https://www.schoolbooks.ie/452254-1241-0-%7CPrim-Ed%7CNew_Handwriting_Today_-_Book_C
https://www.schoolbooks.ie/23772-1241-0-%7CC.J._Fallon%7CModern_Handwriting_4A_%284th_Class%29