[magicalhippo]

So far I haven't seen much of that. There has been a few times were I told them to ask the teacher about clarification of the word count, like how bad would it be if we had 1300 instead of 1000. Sometimes the teacher would say OK if it was relevant stuff.

I can't recall any instance where either of them got a low grade for not fulfilling the assignment due to very limited word count. If you have 200 words it's impossible to go into deep details, that's just how it is.

Of course in those cases we often would have to do multiple passes to cut fluff, focus the arguments by cutting out details, find a word which might replace three others etc. We'd typically start with maybe 4-600 the words and work our way down to 200.

Of course as a teacher, if you just failed your entire class, maybe you need to look at yourself and the assignment you gave rather than the students.

I had one instance of that at high school. When handing back the assignments he loudly proclaimed "Well done, you did by far the best in class" as he handed me my assignment. I looked down and saw a D- on the paper.

The following class the teacher explained what he was looking for, and we would explain what we had learned earlier and he then filled in the gaps.