Hey, Here’s A Fun Fact: Teenagers Have "Unrubric" Ideas, Too

I built Unrubric for a very simple reason: ideas shouldn’t always be competitive or performative.

In my short 2 years of high school, I’ve seen people hire consultants and tutors, paying exorbitant fees, to teach them how to write for contests like John Locke and NYT Summer Contest, or journals like The Concord Review; and in some cases, blur the fine line between mentorship and authorship. It’s really funny that we pay to train ourselves to think in a specific way at a very early age without people realizing that it is, in fact, a big problem.

We normalize the paid mentorship, underplaying how socioeconomic status and unequal access to the internet or digital devices affect students’ achievements in these contests and the fact that we don’t actually have a hub just for teenagers to genuinely express, organize, and develop their ideas. We over-polish our ideas, structure sentences like Shakespeare, making them sound like a 101-year-old tenured professor, paying thousands to tutors just for contests that are meant to be a thing to encourage students to write and develop their academic writing skills. That’s exactly what Goodhart's Law is, and we've built systems where teenagers feel compelled to turn thinking itself into another award.

We need a platform where thinking doesn’t have to be competitive and performative. And here you are.

I hope you have a good time reading our thoughts and independent research (and yes, by independent, we actually mean independent.)

P.S. If you haven’t heard of Goodhart’s Law: once a measure becomes a target, it tends to stop being a good measure. In this case, an essay contest meant to encourage thinking might end up encouraging us to write for winning instead.