True story. In ~1998, in highschool, I was taking AP US History. We had a book report assignment where we had to go to a local university library to look up journals that had reviewed the book(s) we were assigned. Yes, this was a public highschool that had standards.
We also had to find other, non-academic reviews. I used Amazon, and I wrote something like "You have to be careful with Amazon reviews, because some of them are clearly bad faith reviews, either friends of the author or publisher or paid for reviews."
The teacher put a comment on my paper "Yes! You should always be careful to think about the source of what you are reading and WHY they are writing what they wrote."
This is what education should be like.
Amazon reviews being junk is nothing new, though I do agree the scope has gotten worse.
True story. In ~1998, in highschool, I was taking AP US History. We had a book report assignment where we had to go to a local university library to look up journals that had reviewed the book(s) we were assigned. Yes, this was a public highschool that had standards.
We also had to find other, non-academic reviews. I used Amazon, and I wrote something like "You have to be careful with Amazon reviews, because some of them are clearly bad faith reviews, either friends of the author or publisher or paid for reviews."
The teacher put a comment on my paper "Yes! You should always be careful to think about the source of what you are reading and WHY they are writing what they wrote."
This is what education should be like.
Amazon reviews being junk is nothing new, though I do agree the scope has gotten worse.