Can I ask you a professor question? Why is it that everyone I've ever spoken to in an academic context tells me I just can't, will never be able to do a paper/essay in one day when I keep doing it (I know I know, it's a bad habit that's coming out of ADHD and I'm trying to break it) and especially when I keep getting As on those papers? It's not exclusively easy classes either, it's been several senior level classes on complex topics (I am a sophomore and some classes were modern neopaganism in America, which I wrote a 15 page research paper for in one day and got an a, and a theories of counselling psychology class which I wrote a 24 page literature review for in about 26 hours)
I'm glad you asked this, @scattereda-remade2. You really gave me pause for a second there - because all professors do say this, and yet everything you've written here could have been written by a younger version of myself. Though I never got to take a class on modern neopaganism in America and that sounds pretty sick. Sign me up.
But no, you're right. For a certain proportion of the population, essay writing comes easily enough that a one-day paper can still get an A. One of those little unfair things about the world - it does work for some of us. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. To discuss why that's the case, we need to make a distinction between two kinds of paper: papers that get As, and papers that are the best papers they can be. It is an unfortunate fact about 21st century academia that those are not even remotely the same thing.
To explain why, I'm going to have to get into the weeds a bit.
I'm going to assume for this discussion that you're in the United States. That's the academic context in which I've spent my teaching career, but not the one in which I did my undergraduate career. Coming to the US was a real culture shock for me in this respect. At my university in not-the-US, I mostly got As and A-minuses, but the threshold for getting an A was 85% of the available course points. A- was 80%. So, of course, I walk into my first TA job at my new university in the States and start grading according to that same basic structure. My students riot. This is, I learn, not how grading works in the US. In the US, the typical threshold for an A is 90%, and 80 is a B. So, for all my students who were expecting As, being marked down at all was a threat to the GPA that was, in many cases, needed to maintain their scholarships.
So what you end up with in the typical US grading system is a pinch. Students expect As, and in humanities courses your department will also expect the average to be no lower than a B+, barring unusual circumstances. But that means that about half of your class has to be graded in such a way that they get more than 90% of the available points on your rubric. Think about how constraining that is to an evaluator. You have to grade everyone the same way, of course. And that means building a rubric that won't automatically fail everyone whose grasp of English prose is a bit weak. I have no problem with giving out a lot of As. A lot of my students deserve As! This is not really the place to talk about grade inflation, and honestly, I don't think grade inflation is a huge deal once you're already in university. But rubric crunch is a big deal. How can I possibly motivate a student to improve when I can tell them they've done something wrong a maximum of 10 times per term? How can I actually make them see their mistakes when I can't fairly assign a penalty to them?
Thankfully, my university didn't actually have a rule in any of its books that established the 90%-A correlation, so I was able to just put the 85%-A scale in my syllabus and get on my way as normal. Most universities probably would not let me do this. Yours probably doesn't.
So, that's the problem. Grading in the US is an extremely blunt instrument at the high end of the range. There is almost no room for teachers to indicate to already-good students that they can do better using the numbers of the classroom. If you're getting 95% on a paper, that means you wrote a pretty ok paper. But it does not mean that you wrote the best paper the teacher thinks you can write. They just don't have a way of telling you that numerically. Keep in mind that writing is very difficult for many. As the notes of the plagiarism post indicate with horrifying clarity, many high schools completely fail to teach their students how to write. Helping students get from a C-level to a B-level occupies the majority of the pedagogical space on the rubric. But for students who are already competent academic writers, that means that the grade scale is nearly useless.
So let's now turn to the papers themselves. I believe you when you say you can churn out a pretty ok paper in a day. I know I can. But if you're at the level where you can churn out a pretty ok paper in a day, you can write a great paper in two days. The difference is not the total amount of time, it's that there's a break in the middle. You can put that break anywhere you like - between outlining and drafting, between drafting and proofreading, halfway through the draft, or (my favourite) after the draft but before writing the introduction and conclusion. But it's crucial that you at some point look over your paper with fresh eyes, instead of just riding the focus highway all the way through. Because that's how you catch the mistakes.
I grade a lot of papers that are written all in one go, and it's usually pretty obvious. They're competently written, reasonably well-researched papers that have something to say... but the points don't connect. In that rush of words pouring out onto the page, some key step in the argument was omitted. Something so obvious to you that you didn't even notice it was missing. This happens all the time. I notice it in my own work, too! I'm a fast writer, and I often do write a full draft in a day or two of deep focus. But those drafts aren't finished. They need me to step away, reflect on the points I'm making, and then re-evaluate whether or not the text I put on the page actually says the thing I mean.
Students who write like this typically get As. After all, what is an A but a stamp of approval? I do approve of these students. But it's a real shame that the way grades work means that I can't use them to show these students that they could do more. If you can write like this, you're ready for the next level. But I can't tell you that with a number.
I hope you found that peek behind the graders' curtain helpful! This is the sort of thing your professors are probably not in a position to tell you, since, well, it does deflate the value of an A a bit. But you can already see through the smokescreen, so there's no point in hiding it. I hope the effect is to help you take that next step, not to encourage you to rest on your laurels. But you can do what you want! I'm not your boss. I'm not even your professor! Just have fun with it.
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