Thanks for sharing the comments you got - fascinating! The power of RANDOM is really dramatic, esp. given the wide variety of students in the class. I read 10 essays our of sheer curiosity; there were three incoherent essays, six okay but kind of tedious essays, and one essay that could have been great except that it had clearly been edited down from something much longer and was incoherent as a result, but in a different way from the three where the writers just were not sure at all what to do. So, based on that distribution of essays, I was expecting to get maybe one good set of comments out of four, and that was what I ended up with - whereas it looks like you got a large set of comments which are all coherent, although some of them certainly are very imperious! Although I am not a fan of essay-writing and I am concerned that we are not really getting any direct help in improving the feedback we give (some people are obviously going to be very good at giving feedback, but many people are not, since it is something new and unfamiliar), the randomness and unpredictability of the whole thing is really appealing. Anyway, thanks for sharing. I wonder what kind of comments the Random Computer Gods will deliver to me next time - coherent or incoherent? encouraging or imperious? We'll find out soon enough. Have a nice weekend, and thanks again for sharing! :-)