It should be impossible to get a degree in the humanities with such an obvious inability to write cogently. I am referring to his “plays” alone, and on that basis alone he was obviously passed along with solid grades because the instructors at VT lack any intellectual conscience. Even if they were not afraid of him, they would have passed him. It is not just that his writings are crazy and violent, but they are stylistically indefensible; the entire play is a disaster. From what I can tell from his “plays,” and you can actually tell quite a bit, this man is not a college student, but a very angry retard who watched too much television. The writing is simply not at a university level. He should have been changing tires somewhere.
I simply don't think it's possible to conclude that someone can't write a decent term paper because he can't write a decent play, or poem or short story, for that matter. I'm not saying he did write competent papers -- just that I have no way of knowing.
Academic writing is expected to be stiff (though it doesn't have to be), where dialogue isn't. In a calmer mood, contemplating subjects that didn't inspire the kind of bile he spat onto the pages of his plays, he probably paid more attention to his syntax.
As I've mentioned before, maybe on this thread, I used to help out friends at a campus literary rag by screening student submissions. Cho's plays are bad, but far from the worst I've seen. What stands out in them, to me, is the complete lack of plot or character development, and the fact that the dialogue doesn't sound like anyone actually talks. That makes the anger in them all the more disturbing -- it's shapeless, undirected, consuming. None of those is much of a handicap in writing a term paper or essay exam.
The writing is simply not at a university level.
I think you -- and a lot of people -- overestimate university-level writing. A forum like Free Republic, or any message board, blog or newsgroup, attracts people who like to write. Pretty much by definition. There are a lot of folks in the world who don't enjoy writing, or for that matter reading books -- I don't understand those people, but I'm aware they exist.
I know software developers who are smart, interesting people, who can talk about movies or music or politics, but who probably don't read more than one book a year or write anything longer than a memo. I also know suits who write things like "re-engineer our core-processes in a win-win total quality paradigm while maintaining customer focus throughout the enterprise going forward," and they're more dangerous.
I know folks who teach at the college level, and some of the papers they receive are really appalling -- even among students who understand the concepts they're supposed to learn, and who manage in a crude way to communicate that they understand them, the spelling and grammar are enough to make someone who cares about writing cry.
I'm just not willing to jump down the throats of the VT English faculty without reading some of his graded work and seeing what grade it received.