Ask from an archivist working in higher ed: how do you get a student to slow down and pay attention to details?

Hello to all my teacher friends who work with teens and young adults in undergrad, I need your advice purdy please, and earnestly hope this is landing in the appropriate subreddit. The Reddit Educational Network is pretty large, and I'm not currently a teacher, so I'm utterly new, here.

I'm an archivist working in a library that's part of a college in NYC. We are able to hire interns from the student body to help us out with things here and there.

We currently have working for us a very smart, enthusiastic, friendly, go-getting, creative undergrad who doesn't seem to have the ability to pay attention to detail. Her work is riddled with errors: typos, misspellings, ignorance of our styling/standards, missing data, etc. When I've asked her to correct such things, she apologizes profusely with promises of improvement, and hands back a slightly less error-riddled product that still needs quite a bit of fixing (sometimes her corrections have more errors than the original). I've spoken to her gently about taking the time to be careful, and she's enthusiastically nodded that she'll do better, yet she speeds through everything, putting quantity over quality, and follows up by asking for new projects. I've tried to be patient and supportive, but she honestly gives me more work to do, and we're already understaffed at the archive. I'm not getting my own urgent projects done.

I've mentioned these sorts of issues to our boss, and I'm honestly not sure where she stands. She understands my frustration, and promises to speak with this lovely young lady about these issues, but she really likes this student, and her promises don't seem to solve anything.

She's not our student, and I don't think that my boss should be assigning her the kind of work she's been given. My boss will publish her work on our website even if it deserves an F or a D grade unless I and colleagues clean up her errors beforehand, which takes awhile.

So, my question to you all is how do you deal with students like this? Have you found any magic ways to get students who don't seem to see their errors to better understand what's expected of them?

Submitted September 03, 2020 at 09:18AM by binnorie https://ift.tt/2YZLgX5