A short rant on my dislike of the ejournal as a concept

So, to begin with, a little rant on the ejournal as a whole. No offense here to Dr. Sexson, the fact of the matter being I enjoy immensely taking courses from him, even to the point of reccomending my little sister do so when she came to MSU to decide what she wanted to do after getting out of the Peace Corps, but I really dislike ejournals. It punishes folks like myself who work in flurries rather than bit by bit constantly over a semester. The thing about the ejournal is that it doesn't really seem to me to be a measure of how well a person grasps the concepts covered in a course. Rather, it is a reward for those who work steadily, and a punishment for those who work in brief periods of frenzy. I am one of the latter, of course, and now must devote an enormous period of time at the close of the semester to filling ejournal requirements despite having a fairly good grasp on the subject matter of the course, as shown by test scores. I grant here, of course, that the ejournal is very helpful for some students who really need to work constantly and wrestle often with concepts presented in the required texts and in class with which they had not previously dealt, but for those of us who had little difficulty understanding the concepts presented by Frye and Calasso, and who already had a fairly good grasp on the concepts underlying both the biblical and classical traditions, the ejournal was not necessary. Might I suggest, then, that it would be a better idea to have the ejournal be a suggested practice with perhaps the possibility of extra credit, rather than a requirement. After all (or perhaps I have a mistaken impression of the purpose of a university education?) we should be graded on our level of mastery of subject matter, not the amount of work it took us to develop that mastery. The simple fact of the matter is that had I taken this course in the past, when I went to school to learn rather than get good grades and graduate, I wouldn't have done this ejournal at all, and would have missed 150 points because of it. Which is sad, really, to think that someone who has the same working knowledge of biblical and classical tradition that I have would be able to get no higher than a 'C' in this course. But since I have decided to try and be a "good student" and get good grades this rant is really nothing but a waste of time. I'm going to do the ejournal, so I may as well get on with it.