Novelty

At Gnostical Turpitude, Ed discusses an article about a Princeton student's honors thesis. But Ed has some questions:

The more I think about it, the less I'm sure what to make of this article. On the one hand, I'm delighted to see that The New York Times has written a humorous article about academia: America's paper of record would benefit from a couple more good laughs, and I'm always glad when it delves into a (supposedly) intellectual subject. There's a part of me, however, that would have liked to see the paper pay more attention to the thesis's ideas. But would it really be appropriate for the Times to rip an undergrad thesis to shreds? (For that matter, is it fair for a major national newspaper to subject a young student's ideas to a really rigorous public examination, even if those ideas turn out to be sort of okay?)

Undergraduates (and sometimes graduate students) often worry that they can only come up with ideas that the instructor already knows. But, as I always explain, it's not important that I might have already arrived at conclusion X about poem Y; it's important that they have gone through the process of arriving at conclusion X about poem Y. As an instructor, I'm not looking for novelty--although I'm always happy when I see it--but, rather, for signs that the student is improving her technical skills. My response to Ed's final question, then, is "no," even if the student's thesis arrived at some pretty self-evident--to us--conclusions. (Why should the answers be self-evident to a college senior, even one at Princeton?) If I had been the director, the project's innovative design would count far more than the novelty, or lack thereof, of the conclusions--especially since the answers themselves seem, if not earth-shattering, perfectly fine. To a certain extent, I would react the same way to a graduate student's seminar paper. Doctoral dissertations (with which I have nothing to do) would be a different matter.