Why do bad grades happen to good students?

Consider the following two concluding paragraphs. Which is good, which is bad and why?

1) In conclusion, the article that best explains the question of evil is Fackenheim's article. He believes in the idea of fighting against evil whatever is happening, and not abandoning your faith in the process. Evil things will happen to everyone. Unfortunately, pain is inevitable. Everyone will experience pain, but it is important to know how to deal with the pain. As long as you have faith in what is good, you will overcome the bad times.

2) This shows that there are still many uncertainties in understanding why do bad things happen to good people. But, your own opinion on the matter is what counts in the end.

The first conclusion is much better than the second. The second, after all, is hardly a conclusion at all. It simply throws the question back at the reader - telling me that what matters most is what I think. But I asked you the question because I need to give you a grade, and to give you a grade, I need to assess your ability to think. Suppose you were asked a question in physics, and you wrote on the exam, "Professor, what would you say is the answer to the question?" You would not expect to receive a good mark on the grounds that the answer the Professor would give is the correct answer. So too with this paper: asking me that I think simply suggests you have not been bothered to think for yourself.
Conclusion (1) on the other hand takes a clear point is view. Of the three authors, Fackenheim is the best. I do not say that this is good because I think that Fackenheim was the best author - I'm not even sure, without checking, which were the other authors that the student considered. But at least I know what the student in question thought.
(1) is a strong conclusion, (2) is a weak conclusion.
However, a strong conclusion alone does not guarantee a good grade. You cannot simply add a strong conclusion at the end of a paper, and expect to be rewarded. A strong conclusion is a conclusion that needs defending, and the whole of the paper should be devoted to defending it. To defend (1), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that neither of the other two authors said you should always fight against evil and never give up your faith. Think how hard that is - how many believers of any faith have said "Of course, if it gets too bad, you should just give up." To defend (2), you need to demonstrate advantages to Fackenheim's approach. A good conclusion is one that is hard to defend, and the paper is good because it has a good defense of that conclusion. A bad conclusion is easy to defend - the paper gets a low grade, because you do not get credit for setting yourself an easy task and succeeding.

Remember, you are looking at individual thinkers, not at a whole religion. Consider this statement:

However, it is ironic that even though the Christian view gave a much more profound analytical examination of the matter, it is the least helpful. It focuses so intensely on the technicalities trying to disprove that evil is caused at the hands of God that it is the one that focuses least on comforting people who accept their doctrine as universal truth...

This is, I think, a fair comment on Thomas Aquinas, the Christian author who was selected for discussion. Aquinas lived all his life in monastic environments, and spent his time studying and teaching. He did not face the threat of persecution, he did not have to battle with chronic illness and he never faced the prospect of starving to death on the street. His account of evil is indeed part of a highly technical discussion about how the universe functions, and, in comparison with other writers, his work can come across as very cold. However, because the student here refers to it as 'the Christian view', the impression is given that all Christians are as cold and technical in their thinking as Aquinas. Another student made a similar comment about Islam because the Muslim author selected for consideration was Avicenna who, like Aquinas, is primarily concerned with accounting for evil within a metaphysical framework.

Having said that you are looking at individual thinkers, do make sure that you distinguish between translators and authors. Some students write as though Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote a book called The Tipitaka. It would be ridiculous for me to write, as John Rutherford says in his book Don Quixote, "In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall, there lived not long ago one of those country gentlemen or hidalgos who keep a lance in a rack, an ancient leather shield, a scrawny hack and a greyhound for coursing". I am not quoting Rutherford's book, I am quoting Cervantes book. This is what Cervantes says (as translated by Rutherford). It would also be a waste of time for me to point out that Rutherford did not write a new novel, he just translated an existing one. And yet, I had a student say:

However Bodhi simply organized ideas, everything in his paper was primarily sources from Buddhism. I do not believe that the latter is a great contribution to the religion.

Of course, by translating something, Bodhi is not contributing something new to the religion, but he does contribute to our understanding of it. Every time you quote from the Bible in Spanish or English, you are using the work of a translator, and we do not usually acknowledge such translators by name. In English, each translation of the Bible has an abbreviation, for example NRSV for the New Revised Standard Version, JB for the Jerusalem Bible and NEB for the New English Bible. Most of these translation are carried out by committees but there is one translation, the Knox Bible, that was carried out by one single translator, Ronald Knox. But if I'm quoting that translation, I would hardly say, "And there is no need to fear those who kill the body but have no means of killing the soul; fear him more who has the power to ruin the body and the soul in hell", as Ronald Knox said, but he was just translating things Matthew wrote, he didn't even write his own Gospel. You don't want a translator to write a new Gospel, or to add something knew to the religion - in that case, they wouldn't be doing their job. The whole point of Bodhi's book, In The Buddha's Words, is that, if he has done his job well, when you read it you are coming as close as an English-speaking reader can come to reading the Buddha's own words.

Of course, someone who is a translator can also write books of their own. Ronald Knox, as well as translating the Bible, wrote detective stories. "Yet another Quixote translation? Isn't it an act of quixotry to write the thirteenth English version of the great Spanish novel?" is a quotation from Rutherford, a quotation from his introduction to his translation. So too, when preparing for your paper on Buddhism as an atheistic religion, you may have read Bhikkhu Bodhi's book Crossing the Threshold of Understanding. In that book, Bodhi is an author, not a mere translator. Just as Rutherford knows a lot about Spanish literature, so too Bodhi does know a lot about Buddhism, and in this book, he explained some points about Buddhism that, he felt, John Paul II had misunderstood in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. In particular, Bodhi argued that Buddhism is not a nihilistic religion, and the goal is not simply to escape life and so to escape suffering. So, I'm surprised to read statements like this one:

I disagree with the negative point of view Buddhism holds towards life because it contradicts their approach. If life is really something we try to break free of, then there is no real point in doing good deeds in our current life since the second we reach enlightenment everything comes to an end.

This seems to be based on the picture of Buddhism that was painted by Burnouf, back in the 19th Century. Of course, you might really think that Burnouf understood Buddhism better than Bhikkhu Bodhi, but you would have to anticipate that this is a difficult position to defend, and provide me with a good justification. You cannot simply present this point of view as though it were an established fact. (To offer an analogy, I have the right to say that the Manchester Ship Canal is a greater work of engineering than the Panama Canal. But if I just say this as though it is an established fact, I would sound silly. Most engineers would be in agreement that the Panama Canal is a far greater feat of engineering than the Manchester Ship Canal. If I want to maintain the superiority of the Manchester Ship Canal, I would have to have a very good argument ready, (e.g. that the Manchester Canal is more impressive because it is older, and so when it was built, technology was not so advanced).

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