By any literary standard it was good, but I personally prefer horror stories about werewolves and man-eating plants and stuff like that. I don't enjoy the genre when it cuts as near to the knuckle as this story does.
I would actually argue the opposite point. I think that the story had an interesting concept which intrigued me, but by literary standards it just wasn't well-written.
I usually try to be as positive as possible when commenting on stories, but in this case I'm finding it really hard. The story seemed like a strange daydream that the author had while she herself was modeling (I'm willing to bet that since she's an artist's model, this story came to her during a modeling session); however, I think it needed a lot more thought put into it before it could be called a finished story. It felt half-formed to me, for these reasons:
1.) The setting was vague--either the future or an alternate reality, with the only defining characteristics being the unspecified "neural interface" and the food coupons the model was working for. We never really found out why the students were using the interface (to give them deeper insight into her emotional state, I guess?), and it seemed like an unnecessary detail. It didn't advance the plot or affect the characters in a significant way--the same themes could have been explored without it--and it raised distracting questions which actually took away from the effectiveness of the story, I felt.
2.) There weren't any well-defined characters for us to care about. The model and the teacher were the only ones explored in any detail, and we only got the model's inner monologue to go by. It would have helped if she could have had a discussion with one or two of the students, or even with the teacher, but she just kind of stood there in silence. I guess that's a requirement of her job in this world, but I thought a little bit of dialogue would have done wonders to engage the reader.
3.) There didn't seem to be much at stake. There were implications that the model could lose her job if she didn't perform well, but that would just force her to find another job at a different school. Since we don't know anything else about the world except that it has neural interfaces and food coupons, we don't know how hard that would be for her. If the teacher was just bullying her to elicit her emotional states, then she wasn't really in danger of losing her job anyway. And if she's been doing this for a while, shouldn't she have realized what he was doing? If he wasn't doing it for that reason, then he's just a dick, and she's better off not working with him anyway. I understand that a certain amount of her self-esteem was at stake, but if the story was just about her self-esteem then it didn't need the food coupons and neural interface elements.
Overall, it felt like an SF story, and not a horror story. It would have seemed more at home on Escape Pod, but even then I'd have had the same problems with it. As an idea, I think it has potential, but, for me, the execution was lacking. If the author's intent was just to say, "Man, it's hard being an artist's model. Some days I feel like I'm working for food coupons, and I have to put up with some mean teachers," then that's fine, but it's not very compelling. If the author's intent was to say something more profound about the human condition, then it was too muddled to work for me.
There, that's pretty brutal. I don't feel good about myself for tearing apart someone else's work, but this one just really bothered me. I thought it stuck out as a sub-par story--but that's compared to Pseudopod's usually very high standards of quality. It's possible that I missed some really good aspects of the story because I was too focused on what I didn't like. Maybe it's just a case of "this wasn't for me."