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That F isn't for Fail, it's for Fuck You

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by dubyu tee eff, Oct 4, 2011.

  1. Aetius

    Aetius
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    I'd agree with you if the tests were long enough to produce a valid distribution and the professor scaled accordingly, but I once got a 75 on a midterm because there were only four questions and one them was "What element has 83 protons?" and I had forgotten to bring a periodic table (silly me, assuming that such a basic reference would be available if the test required it).
     
  2. Kampf Trinker

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    I generally don't have a problem with it. In one class I got an A when I only finished with 73%. However, in Dubyu's case where the class average was 24% it can only mean one of three things.

    1. Nobody has any idea what the professor is trying to teach. He is a horrible teacher.
    2. The professor has a ridiculous grading system.
    3. The class is fucking retarded.

    50% might almost be ok for an average on an essay test. If it's multiple choice it means these poor kids are not at all prepared for their profession, and it's probably the professor's fault.
     
  3. mya

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    Anybody else's school do the "reverse scale" thing? Basically there were 5 A's available, 10 B's, 10 C's and so on. So essentially the students were ranked and the grades were dispersed based on your standing among your classmates, regardless of your numerical grade. So, if you got a 90, but everybody else in the class got a 91 or above, you failed. My science labs were like this in undergrad. Made things kind of competitive.
     
  4. Harry Coolahan

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    It's not the grading issue, it's the fact that it demonstrates how few students were capable of answering the question. If every student in the class is getting the wrong answer on more than half the test, then that test is either not reflecting the material being taught or the material is not being taught well. A student that learns everything in class should always be capable of getting 100% on a test—if he can't, then what the fuck is the point of including a question that no one can reasonably answer?

    What an awful system. In every large class, I always participated in study groups with 10-15 other students before an exam. I also made it a habit of emailing the entire class my comprehensive study guide a couple weeks prior, without expecting anything in return. Collusion allows everyone to learn more, a "reverse scale" all but guarantees that everyone loses (and even worse, it rewards those that are most self-serving).
     
  5. Racer-X

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    The only crazy professor I had was actually pretty entertaining. It was an undergraduate state history class. He was a professor who had been there forever and didn't really seem to care much about lecturing in that particular class. He would bring in musical acts sometimes and he almost always opened the class by playing Randy Newman's "Short People" which was pretty funny because he was probably 5'3". If you haven't heard the song, it talks about how short people are horrible and dirty.

    The entire grade in the class was based on 2 tests, one was worth 75% and the other 25%. A lot of people were freaking out about the grading.

    This guy also inherited a bunch of money at some point and donated a huge amount to the university. Both the stadium and baseball field were named after him. He apparently pissed some people off in city government because when they went to name something after him in recognition of all his charitable work, they picked a landfill.

    One of my undergrad classes did that, I think mechanics of materials. One kid had a numerical score over 90 but wasn't in the top 10 or whatever so he was going to get a B. He started ranting and yelling at the professor in the middle of a class and eventually started crying.
     
  6. ouroboros

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    I had no money and no real desire to go to college, but I went to the local Community College to make it appear to my family that I had some sort of ambition. It was a nightmare. Financial Aid was a joke. I spent more time in line at the FA office than I did in class. Someone screwed up and my money didnt come through, so my classes were canceled. The money finally came and I was told to re-register. By then, just about all my required classes were filled, so I had to scramble to get what I could. Communications Majors had a Theater requirement, and the only theater class left was Acting 1.

    The prof was a sweet lady who was at least in her 60's. The class was easy. It was held in an old ratty building that used to be a storage shed. all we really did was practice projecting our voices, doing goofy improv exercises and act out excerpts from random plays. One day, one of the guys was doing a soliloquy and the prof went pale. "STOP RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE," she says, and gets up from her seat. "Dont you see him? Dont you see him?" We looked at each other, then to the guy, and were like "Yeah we see him. He was just doing his part and you stopped him." "No, I mean the GHOST! Hes right there next to him! He's imitating his every move and LAUGHING! Can't you hear it?" She then went on to tell us with great delight how she sees the ghosts quite often. They were servicemen from WWII who used to hang out in that storage shed which was now our classroom. They would put on shows of their own sometimes, just for her.

    To this day I dont know if she was putting on a little play of her own, but the school was built on an old army base. I just took my B and moved on.
     
  7. scootah

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    When I went to uni, I went in as an adult. I'd been working in IT for several years and was doing pretty senior engineer work for a national leader/top five in the world industry leader. A bunch of the first year classes related directly to the field we operated in and I was the senior tech resource for that national leader. I figured I was a pretty solid shot for at least a semester's worth of recognition for prior learning. Maybe first year since I had clear career history including training and managing grads from the program I was going into. (I was going into the program to try and qualify for visa conditions to work internationally). I got laughed out of the reviewers office with a bunch of snide comments about the presumptuous nature of my request. Suitably humbled, I signed up for the first year courses and figured they must be crazy difficult.

    In my first class, I had the teacher who'd laughed me out of the RPL request. She first insisted that Gopher was a major internet protocol (this was 2004 ish) that was widely used for commercial applications. In my second class that semester, with the same teacher - she brought in an 'expert' on 'internet design' to show us how to build a website. Her expert was a veteran of one website build, using front page and a microsoft access database. Had trouble opening the access database to show the class what a database looks like - I had to help her. Despite getting perfect marks for my first semester, and being invited to guest lecture two classes for one of my subjects, and offered work as a tutor for my other classes by lecturers who assumed I was doing my second degree, I was still knocked back for a review of my application for RPL at the end of semester. Fuck that bitch.
     
  8. dubyu tee eff

    dubyu tee eff
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    Thinks he has a chance with Christina Hendricks...

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    For our class it is pretty simply what the issue is. Microe theory I is basically all about constrained optimization: maximize the value of this function given this constraint (lagrangians and hessians, for those who have some math background). So the problems are usually quite simple to describe but their difficulty depends mostly on the functional forms, that is, if the constraint or the utility function is complicated, you'll be stuck doing annoying math for ages. Our homework is usually just like this with some kinks thrown in. The homework usually takes us about 2-3 days between looking at it and having a completed assignment. Unfortunately, his exam was a lot like the homework so we had to find a way to do what usually takes us 2-3 days in 75 minutes. This is more or less impossible so the strategy really just becomes rack up as many points as you can because you have zero chance of completing every problem. The sudoku was a huge curveball though where he tried a little hard to be clever and ended up making all of us waste so much time figure out what the fuck the problem was that most people just decided to leave it blank. I guess if it all gets weighted on a bell curve it doesn't matter but it is just incredibly frustrating to walk out of an exam thinking if you just had more time you could have gotten a whole lot more points. I think the sadistic fuck just gets off on watching us be frustrated.
     
  9. ghettoastronaut

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    I had a toxicology professor who decided to have "essay" exams. I say "essay" in quotation marks because they were "essays" in the sense that Twilight is "literature". Sure, they're words on a page. They would consist, for example, of drawing this diagram:

    [​IMG]

    Except you would not even get full marks for drawing that, because we also had to show the partial charges and flow of electrons.

    After this was drawn, you had to explain it word-by-word, because as our bitchy TA explained, "my four year old cousin could memorize this, it doesn't show that you understand anything". So we'd explain this in a very detailed manner. You might describe this chart by stating that acetaminophen forms a reactive intermediate. You'd get marks for this. If you explained that acetaminophen forms an intermediate is reactive, you did not get marks. I am not making this up.

    The kicker is, in my ER rotation, I actually saw a real case of acetaminophen toxicity. The resident asked me if any of his prior meds were dangerous to start in the setting of his toxicity. I didn't know. The enzyme that promotes conversion of acetaminophen to NAPQI wasn't actually on that diagram, and, clinically, is one of the most important things to know. It's CYP 2E1, if you were wondering.

    We also had a stats course in first year. So, there were over 2000 applicants for my program, for 240 spaces, all of whom had completed at least one year - usually more - of undergrad. The stats exams were open book. The average for the first midterm was about 50% (it got bell curved slightly afterwards). Stats profs everywhere seem to be exactly the same in preferring to cock students around instead of actually teaching them things.
     
  10. Omegaham

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    This is because stats is kind of a bastard subject. I liked to hang out in my stats teacher's room after school, and he told me that there was actually huge fight over whether AP Stats would be taught by the math department, the science department, or the English department. The reason was simple - because pretty much all of the math was done on the calculator, (fail) it wasn't really a math class; it was a logic class, closer to philosophy than it was to actually teaching the math behind the subject. No wonder they wanted the English department teaching the class.

    What does this distribution represent? What does it suggest? Yes, you have to say "suggest," because "shows" has the wrong connotation. What is the correlation between X and Y? What does this suggest? Haha, trick question! It doesn't suggest ANYTHING! You can't negate the null hypothesis, that's all! I ended up bitching to my dad about it, and he laughed in my face. "Son, I've been an actuary for twenty years. This is my job - explaining those concepts to people who have absolutely no idea what they're looking at. Thanks for shitting on the profession that puts your food on the table."

    On focus: Military instructors are laughably bad. Take a random guy from the field and say, "Ok, you're going to teach these students what you know. But you're going to do it in this ridiculously precise manner that necessitates reading from the book. If you deviate at all from what's printed in the book, you get marked down on your evaluations."

    Our regular instructors were decent despite this... but one time they had to deal with a guy getting in a fight with the cops, so this batshit insane staff sergeant took over the class. He had to have been close to 40 and wasn't getting promoted to gunny, and he didn't give a FUCK. First thing he did was grab a circuit card out of the radio and break off a resistor. "It's broken. FIX IT."

    "Uh, we aren't allowed to touch the soldering irons, we're not qualled."
    "I don't give a fuck, because your sergeant isn't going to give a fuck when you get out there. It's broken. Fix it. NOW! DO IT RIGHT GODDAMN NOW BEFORE I PUT THIS SOLDERING IRON UP YOUR ASS!"

    And we did. It got more and more complicated throughout the day, ranging from simple resoldering of resistors to taking a chip out and replacing it. Best class I'd ever had; I'd done simple soldering before, but never on working gear. It was great experience, although the guy sure loved yelling.

    And then, the next day, we went back to them droning from the book. It felt like a dream.