I am just amazed (and alarmed) about the performance of students on my essay questions. I asked a very simple essay question for one of the courses I teach in. In fact I felt rather bad about the question afterwards because it was such an easy question - I thought most of the students would have it right. Boy was I surprised when I got the answers and found that over half of the class had failed my question. I actually had told them the answer in question in a way when I was going through my lecture.