This is the third time in the last month I have had an academic tell my class (different classes) that they have decided not to do final exams. Because "some students can't cope with time pressure" or "it's not fair on everyone" or "I don't believe in exams". They couch it in the language of "equity", despite the fact that it clearly screws over students who are good at exams/aren't as good as assignments... This, on top of making practicals "non-compulsory", or removing lab/field classes altogether...
This ain't my first rodeo. I've been around for a while. I've never seen this before, even in the years immediately post-Covid...
And this isn't gender studies. This is, supposedly, Science and GIS.
I'm not sure how widespread this is, but I've heard from other students that more and more courses are going down this route, all very suddenly...
This despite the fact that students are much more likely to cheat on assignments than exams (obviously), and the "threat" of things like ChatGPT.
Not just at my Uni, either. Apparently this is happening elsewhere in Aus... Though my Uni has been particularly spiteful about it, with the removal of after-hours study spaces, and things like not even allowing library access to part time students on Sundays (yes, really)...
Something is very, very rotten in the state of Denmark. Not sure if other people have seen similar, in other countries, but if this is the state of "Higher Ed", even beyond all the woke shit..? Wow, we are so fucked...
Exams are a means to enforce a certain standard of competence and make the success of your teaching methods measurable.
Either of those are anathema to the DIE woketards.
One of my lecturers is a "coloured" South African immigrant...
I genuinely get the feeling that she would just love to jump up and kill the lot of us, lol, and given current trends in that country, I may not be that far off...
She's... Actually crazy. And awful at lecturing at the same time...
Yeah, each of these "teachers" has been a woke immigrant woman (they have that in common) so maybe you're not far off, there, as part of the reason...
It's insane, to me, as someone who values that basic competence...
Like, if anything, the more logical thing would be to move in the opposite direction. But then, I guess this isn't about logic, so... That makes sense, to some extent.
Bad exams often boil down to testing the student's memory over their understanding of the coursework and how to apply it. Scrapping them isn't the answer, however. Make better exams or change the weighting of it. Hell, be a better teacher.
Regardless, these are all bandaid solutions to what is becoming abundantly clear a needed roots and all solution to education.
Why is this bad?
Because it gives the student who memorized the solution to the exact problem in the coursework without understanding the functional application of the broader concepts an equal score to the student who has a full grasp of the subject.
But in reality one is a capable and useful problem solver and the other is a very well spoken parrot.
Depending on what you are studying, memorization is important. I assume medicine, legal, biology, chemistry would need a very good amount of memorization.
But I do get your point in most fields.
Memorizing every medication on the market doesn't help you if you can only rattle off their names and uses when presented with a problem.
For sure, I'm not saying it is the only thing that matters, I'm just saying is important.
Engineered incompetency crisis incoming. The purpose of equity/equality was never to raise up the turd whirled, but to lower the West to turd whirled standards.
And the issues the prof was describing? Exactly what you get when a species no longer has any selective forces working against mass breeding.
And oh, I bet the "can't take stress" kids are the exact same crowd that tell others to "git gud" at video games when it comes to getting stuck at hard SP boss fights.
AusGov is currently trying to ram through legislation which would make it so if you are Indigenous (bearing in mind that you never have to prove that you are), you are essentially unable to be failed out of University...
Currently, if you fail more than 50% of your classes, beyond a certain point, you can no longer get our equivalent of student loans.
In the pursuit of "equity", the government wants to make it so that if you're "blak", this rule no longer applies to you...
So yeah. It's even worse than you think.
For a while there, I was like, "well that's just dumb", but now I realise that it's more than that - it's intentionally malicious...
Like, this is very clearly deliberate, and they fundamentally do not care what the consequences and flow-on effects of decisions like this will be...
Madness.
That is just stupid. Why would handling time-pressure not be part of the mark? You have to handle that in the real world all the time, why would an uni class shy from it? Isn't the point of it to prepare you for the real world?
I guess in theory that is the point, but in reality we seem to be moving further and further from that "idea" of education...
I just had a conversation with a third-year civil engineering student from Vietnam, who had inexplicably just transferred the last year of his degree from Viet to Aus (and been allowed to), because "I preferred the subjects", or something to that effect...
Couldn't even form a full sentence in English. And yet, clearly his expectation is that in two years time, he will get a civil eng job in this country, and obviously remain here and work.
That's... Frankly kind of worrying. And you see that all the time...
Chokegaspwheeze -my brother, you appear to have fallen into some form of temporalspacial anomaly and have appeared 30+ years in the future from when that was last true. I'm afraid things have degraded somewhat from those halcyon days you come from
Not sure if you've had to work with zoomers much, but my god, the conformism and trend-following has surely reached its apotheosis by now...
They're just a bunch of bleating, Apple-obsessed sheep. It really is quite sad, tbh.
*needs to make "Sheeps is ..." memes from last night's Housebroken
It has been happening for years, especially in humanities/social science type classes. And while some of it may be DIE stuff, in my experience it is overwhelmingly faculty laziness with the DIE label now slapped on it for cover. Seriously, probably 2/3 (if not more) of the faculty at the school I teach at are the laziest people you've ever met.
So many faculty at the school I teach at just skipped finals to check out of the semester a week early (realistically, 2 weeks early because you don't have to grade final exams/projects if you don't assign them) that the administration now needs to send out reminders every semester: In order to maintain accreditation, you need to meet or exceed a certain length of classroom time (based on the number of credits), and skipping the final exam time means you don't meet that.
And it's more than just final exams. A lot of the faculty will complain loudly if their schedule requires them to be on campus more than 3 days a week. There was a huge fight during our last contract renegotiation because a lot of faculty wanted to be able to hold their office hours from home via Zoom rather than do them on campus. In Spring 22 I saw multiple e-mails from people saying that committee meetings should be moved online due to the Russian attack on Ukraine making gas prices prohibitively expensive. There are still some faculty who cite the WuFlu as a reason why their classes need to be online.
TL;DR - many professors are the laziest people you'll ever meet and they're just using the DIE stuff as cover to get out of having to do anything beyond the absolute bare minimum to keep their job.
Having professors/staff on campus is why University is a draw. Take those last things away and there's no point in spending all of that money. You can network for free with other peers. It's amazing that they aren't there 5 days a week for tuition costs these days. In the U.S. there is an equal amount of fake jobs bloat that matches the amount of actual productive Uni staff. Like diversity counselors, wellness, HR, admins, student safety, social workers. College needs a hard reboot. These schools need to start losing accreditation for turning out these useless graduates.
You might be on to something here, to be honest...
Although the problems I am seeing are suggestive that there are fundamental problems with this institution (where I am at), beyond just the teaching...
I've literally just discovered that the University has done away with Academic Integrity Declarations, "because it is taken as a given that students accede to this when they enrol in a course". That's ludicrous. Nonsensically so.
I'm also going to lose 2% of my final grade for a subject, because the subject coordinator failed to set the dates for quizzes properly, resulting in a situation where you cannot re-attempt the quiz within the designation timeframe, even though we were explicitly told that we would have multiple attempts, and now the lecturer refuses to fix it/even answer questions about it (which is more petty and frustrating than anything else)...
Do you use Canvas, where you're at?
We switched from Blackboard to Canvas, and it's the biggest load of bullshit ever. Fundamentally does not work, and the University has outsourced tech support to the company that sold them Canvas as an LMS, resulting in farcical situations all round...
Honestly, it is getting so bad that I don't think there is any way I will finish my degree here (i.e. I fully intend to attempt to transfer out of this anarchic shithole, if there is any way I can do so), because this is just... Insane.
On the laziness thing specifically, I have one lecturer now who has decided she's not going to turn up, for a full day of tutorials. Even though they're scheduled for 100 people, across that day. Forcing us all to turn up to a different day - too bad if you already have a class that will clash...
Like, the situation here is seriously, seriously fucked. I genuinely can't believe how much so...
If there's documentation on the syllabus or something that you would be allowed multiple attempts,, that should be grounds for a formal academic complaint. I'd recommend checking what you're school's grievance policy is (assuming you think the 2% is worth the effort).
We've been switching LMS systems every 3 years or so, so it is perpetually a mess regardless of what system it is. By the time the college gets it working properly and people figure out how to use it we're transitioning to the new one.
Oh, absolutely. The entire higher ed system is fouled up beyond belief on many levels. And I'm skeptical it can be fixed at this point, short of gutting the whole thing.
Even if it isn't from pure laziness, many professors only exist on campus to justify the funding/access/equipment for their research. The teaching shit is just how they accomplish that and have an infinite pool to draw assistants and guinea pigs from.
All of these classes have scrapped assigned texts, too. I forgot to mention that…
So essentially we have: courses that are entirely at the whim of the lecturer, with no independent source of content (i.e. a textbook or workbook of some description), and no externally-marked exams…
Had an internal “quiz” today and it was less formal, and worse-managed, than fucking High School, which says a lot…
I can’t imagine any of that flying, at University level, even, say, 5 years ago…
Something is very, very wrong.
Currently in the library observing a giant Polynesian/SE Asian tranny creep out a girl while her boyfriend is in the toilet (it's halfway across the room, and it's not my problem), while she tries to keep a straight face...
Society is so fucked, lol.
Its almost like exams are desined to cut the weak and pathetic from the roster.
Affirmative action students can't pass the exams, it'll make the teacher, the school, and the affirmative action policies look bad, might as well cancel the exams
We're gonna be so fucked in the next 20 years once the majority of competent people die and get replaced with these pansies.
This is just obfuscation to fudge the numbers to the benefit of retards of color.
Interesting insight.
This may also be the administration telling them not to fail people. A friend of mine is a professor and he was telling me the administration forced out the head of the science department because he was failing too many people in inorganic chemistry. The administration's view was that those students wanted to be doctors and they shouldn't be locked out from med school because of a class and med schools offer remedial programs to get people up to speed.
I have students in a 3rd year writing course that can barely write a paper. Pathetic APA knowledge, can't make solid points to support a thesis, garbage references, etc., etc.
American colleges, maybe other countries as well, are just made to push people through because its more profitable now. Its not about education, its about selling a subscription service you must have for X time before you get to the goal: a piece of paper that is barely relevant in the workforce now compared to even tangential work experience in the field.
Honestly I don't like forcing students who have very high scores in the class through previous, more focused exams, to take a final that will only invite cramming of basic memorization concepts because you can't cover a 15 week semester in one 3 hour exam. It doesn't breed anything good.