I really do expect the work in your portfolio to be revised. Please understand that revision does not mean merely correcting a few grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors (though that of course is important). Revision means re-envisioning your work—re-imagining it, re-creating it, transforming it into something better than what you started with.
It seems that most students really do often assume that revision consists mainly of copy-editing, of correcting the pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that plague almost every manuscript. They are wrong, of course, and sometimes resistant to the rather vague terms re-envisioning or re-imagining or re-creating, and have to be pushed—pushed somewhat gently for the beginners and with a bit more urgency for advanced students—toward taking up the necessary challenge of making their writing better and facing the sad fact that their writing, fresh from their nimble minds, just isn’t good enough as it is.
In a letter to a friend, Leo Tolstoy said, "...What I published previously I consider only a test of the pen and ink. What I am printing now I like better than the earlier things, but it seems weak, needed as an introduction. But what is coming!"
That pile of paper you printed off and I hope you’re gazing so fondly at is merely—adequate. It’s mediocre. Even though it’s a work of genius, it’s just average. The “what is coming!” is the work that you will create through revision, the new work—the new novel, the new story—the true work of genius as it ought to be. The problem then facing the writer—facing you and all writers—is getting the text to the point where it’s good and brilliant enough to abandon, to quit, to say it is finished and ready for publication, a process that takes place in the brain as much as it does on the page.