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Philosophy pretty much is old dudes arguing, and it gets infuriating. For example, check out Kant's "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics," a book he wrote about metaphysics that essentially said "stop writing books about metaphysics guys." It was like the loving precursor to effortposts made in attempts to stop derails. WAS KANT A GOON?!?! That's not to say that all of philosophy is bad. The ancient Greeks are a blast to read, logic and ethics are always fun, and there are a lot of good things to be said about early American philosophy. I love the look of realization on students' faces when they read "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and figure out that he was not only a pimp, but a genius, too.
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Mar 28, 2014 13:30
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A couple years ago I did some post-graduate work in digital forensics...I do not know how you manage to do courses online that involves examining physical evidence, but they pulled it off. I remember they used to mail us hard drives so that we could do forensic workups on them. Anyway, I took four classes and for the last two I had to write papers, and I was SHOCKED how easy it was to bamboozle a bunch of people with advanced degrees in computer science. Apparently no one in the major can write coherently, so if there was any structure to the paper at all they were giving it at least a B. If it was even semi-informative, it got an A. I guess it's not really a complaint, just a rather surprised observation.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:26
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Alter Ego posted:A couple years ago I did some post-graduate work in digital forensics...I do not know how you manage to do courses online that involves examining physical evidence, but they pulled it off. I remember they used to mail us hard drives so that we could do forensic workups on them. I am not surprised. Nobody knows how to loving write at my university, not even the professors.
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Mar 28, 2014 16:14
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The professor in my Human Variations class decided to assign people to groups according to their score on a single-paragraph summary of an article she posted online. She grouped a high-scoring with one mid-scoring and one low-scoring student, for ~30 groups of 3. Unfortunately I was the high-scoring person in my group, and our low-scoring person hasn't come to class in 3 weeks. So now I and the other person have to do the entire end-semester project by ourselves.  Luckily the mid-scoring student in my group is my best friend in the class, so that's something nice. I know she'll be a useful partner too, she only got a lower score because she accidentally forgot to put the class number on her paper. It just annoys me that the professor put together groups for a project that is 40% of our final grade based on one tiny paragraph, and that the professor docked a student 3/10 points for forgetting to include the class number on said paragraph. I feel like there'd be a more effective way to create groups...say, by looking at the essay scores of our midterms?
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Mar 28, 2014 18:45
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There's like, an infinite number of ways to combine students to make a terrible group and the only times they get it right is by accident.
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Mar 28, 2014 18:57
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I was always the high-scoring student in those intentionally mismatched groups and I hated it. I could kill teachers that create groups that way. Just because I am smart doesn't mean I have the skills to teach someone something they didn't understand the first time the professor tried to teach them. E: might have underexplained there, what I mean is that as the high-scorer I usually had to guide my group mate through the lesson and/or assignment
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Mar 28, 2014 19:00
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Semester-long group projects blow. When the group works (a rarity), it sucks. When the group doesn't work, you can literally feel the creative lifeforce and dreams that you brought to college being sucked out of your body as you try to convince the stoned retard in the group that no, his idea makes zero loving sense, and we will not put it in the goddamn paper. .
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Mar 28, 2014 19:28
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I've only had one good group for an end-semester project, and it was last semester. Our professor told us that whoever sat at your table on Day 1 would be your partners, with some wiggle room according to grades later in the semester. The guys I got grouped with were a computer science major, a business major, and a chemistry major. They were all nice and were willing to put forth work, and it was actually enjoyable to hang out with them. We got an A+ for our end project - we made a poster and fake advertising for a knock-off Indiana Jones movie - and were the only ones to get above a B+ in the class. They all graduated last winter, but I still occasionally talk to them. While group projects may make you unhappy and sometimes infuriated, just remember that out there, somewhere, you may find a class with your very own CS/Business/Chemistry group.
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Mar 28, 2014 19:47
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At least you didn't end with the group, with that guy in it, no, not the stoner. The guy who's doing the first semester, a second time, after not showing up/failing the exams the first time, not doing any work on the project, trying to turn in stuff from LAST YEARS project and being clueless. Seriously, it was amazing, he uploads some crap to dropbox about China, which was fairly decent, and about a holepuncher, awesome right? Nope, the project was about a drat fitness bench, the plagarizing little poo poo. He failed the exam, of course. And refused to answer at the reexam, hoping to be allowed to carry on through the second semester, turns out, you can't refuse to participate in reexams, so he was kicked out. A happy ending, to story of poo poo. Oh yeah, and the dyslexic guy who didn't know what "conglomerate" meant, the ditzy airhead, who was cute and could do ONE thing, spell good, and nothing else. And we where the group of failure, we all hosed the market analysis up, the teachers used that to determine the groups, so hey. Two out of six failure rate, not to bad.
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Mar 28, 2014 21:53
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A White Guy posted:Semester-long group projects blow. When the group works (a rarity), it sucks. When the group doesn't work, you can literally feel the creative lifeforce and dreams that you brought to college being sucked out of your body as you try to convince the stoned retard in the group that no, his idea makes zero loving sense, and we will not put it in the goddamn paper. Oh man, I actually experienced this last semester when one guy in our group constantly showed up to group meetings as if he'd just gotten stoned ten minutes beforehand. Literally all of his suggestions had to do with somehow trying to integrate some non sequitor story about his girlfriend into the game we were developing, it was infuriating as all hell.
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Mar 29, 2014 00:36
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Yeah, Stoner/Slacker guy is why I just roll into the first meeting of a group project with two or three rough pitches. And it always ends up with one guy saying, "Well, I have some ideas!" He never elaborates, has no research, and there's zero follow through on basic poo poo. But he always wants to call a quorum and group decide the project direction two or three weeks after the assignment because me putting together proposals and telling the group to do poo poo "isn't fair".
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Mar 29, 2014 02:42
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A White Guy posted:Semester-long group projects blow. When the group works (a rarity), it sucks. When the group doesn't work, you can literally feel the creative lifeforce and dreams that you brought to college being sucked out of your body as you try to convince the stoned retard in the group that no, his idea makes zero loving sense, and we will not put it in the goddamn paper. I had one where I had the smallest group in the class, the professor realized the topic he gave my group needed to be changed, then hosed up changing it so he had to change it again with like no time left in the class, then one of the group members dropped the class leaving my group at me and one other person. Then I got swine flu. Which gave me pneumonia. So I was barely able to do anything for like two weeks. Somehow we still passed. I think he took pity on us.
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Mar 29, 2014 03:03
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I just took a Geography 101 test. I like it because the professor has a PH.D in fluvial systems and actually cares about the poo poo he is teaching. However the test today was really mean. Literally 20 questions out of 60 that were matching Influent and Effluent rivers to terms that describe them. I loving FORGOT WHICH WAS WHICH So I guessed. Effluent sounds like it does what it does without influence and influent sounds like it's influenced by other factors, so I took a leap of faith based off of that stupid reasoning. Looking it up, I picked the right choices  But seriously, 1/3 of the test is based on two terms. That loving sucks.
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Apr 4, 2014 15:40
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TheShrike has a new favorite as of 20:30 on Nov 18, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2014 19:24
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Kontradaz posted:Thats why you don't major in a useless major. 
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Apr 4, 2014 19:29
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karl fungus posted:How does a unisex bathroom work? Is it just all stalls, or are they just single-occupant rooms? My college is making a push to make all dorm bathrooms unisex, and this plan saves me about 20 yards of walking round trip, so I'm a fan. Seriously though, it's turned out to be a total nonissue, and I was skeptical at first.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:37
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Kontradaz posted:Thats why you don't major in a useless major. I'm majoring in accounting at one of the best business schools in my state, I just took Geography 101 for gen. eds. In other news, I saw a girl with blue hair and anime poo poo plastered all over her bag. A lot of "art" majors look like this.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:50
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Kavak posted:
We have to do discussion boards on it as a key portion of our grade (and in another class, we do tests through it. You can totally save and come back to this, guys! Really! You just lose a point per minute past x length of time, that's all!). And the red text came from a description of a feminist-centric sci-fi fantasy story I was working on for a while. Rather Watch Them posted:At least it was $90 cheaper than my psychology Oh, that's another fun thing---textbooks that come as looseleaf and thus can't be sold to get back even part of the $150 you paid for it! Astrofig has a new favorite as of 21:11 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 21:00
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/sympathetic hug to people without a nice electronic submission system like CROPS. By the way, what the hell is your red text from?
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Kontradaz posted:Thats why you don't major in a useless major. This is a pet peeve of mine, why is it any buissness of yours why I'm in a History program? I'm perfectly happy in my "useless" major jerk!
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Apr 4, 2014 21:14
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Since you're paying for it I'd say it's all your business. In socialist Denmark and it's the state who's paying it's another can of worms altogether.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:53
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How Rude posted:Looking it up, I picked the right choices Welcome to post-secondary, that's why my biggest piece of advice to any new students is to star or highlight subjects the professor puts emphasis on (and study hard on them) because at least 1/3rds of every test will contain it. But, anyways, take it easy on him everyone we all took a course we knew was useless because we needed credits and there were no other options that semester. I took Art History 101 for Christ's sake because not only did I need the credits but it opened up some unrelated 200-level courses for me (long story as to how that was possible) that had credits that counted.
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Apr 4, 2014 22:56
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Oh hey, so guess what else is awesome? Thanks to budget cuts, we have to provide our own scantrons for tomorrow's test! which means driving from St. Louis county to South County because the loving bookstore closed early!
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Apr 4, 2014 23:04
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Boiled Water posted:Since you're paying for it I'd say it's all your business. Yeah, but I think higher education is such a boon to society as a whole, everyone who wants it should be allowed to have it, that however, isn't really on track. People who go "good luck finding a job sucker" when they talk to anybody taking an Arts degree can go eat a dick. This is almost exclusively Buisness students too, who are all dicks.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:05
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I think we can all agree that business students are dicks. What puzzles me is what makes med students in assholes in america but pleasant people in Scandinavia.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:24
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Boiled Water posted:I think we can all agree that business students are dicks. free healthcare
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Apr 4, 2014 23:39
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Austrian mook posted:free healthcare You joke but I think there might be some element of truth to this. Med students know that not every patient they get is going to be able to afford their care, and that's most often going to lead to some loving tragic circumstances. I like to think they tend to reflexively become assholes to protect against this phenomena so as to be less depressed by having to turn away people who need care and can't afford it.
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Apr 4, 2014 23:56
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Boiled Water posted:I think we can all agree that business students are dicks. gently caress you! I'm not a dick!  For content, I really like our library. We have access to academic databases from all over on the library website so it's a cinch finding sources for lit. reviews, research papers, and annotated bibliographies or poo poo like that. Plenty of books and other media too, it's pretty big! The only thing I don't like about it is the lame architecture. I always saw really cool looking libraries in colleges in media everywhere even if they aren't Yale or Harvard quality in expenses/old age. My university's library is too new and therefore boring and office-like with grey all over. Nothing like college putting boring rear end gray walls all over the place! Guess they're preparing me for when I get my internship/job, though. 
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Apr 5, 2014 00:01
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Georgia Tech has the best digital archive of scholarly literary journals in the state.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:07
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Double Plus Good has a new favorite as of 19:33 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 17:00
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My school offers "regular" 3 hour lecture courses and "hybrid" 2 hour lecture/1 hour online component courses. The thing is, there's no criteria for what constitutes an online component. What this means in practice is that my "regular" accounting course requires 2 extra hours a week of online reading and quizzes worth 40% of my grade, while my "hybrid" communications course had the prof lecturing right up until the 2 hour mark with no additional online component or online assignments 
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Apr 5, 2014 19:43
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Double Plus Good posted:I seriously hate this as well, even though I majored in an allied health field that has pretty good post-graduation job security (99% employment rate for all graduates in the last 5 years). My university was recently posted low on some ROI list, and some of my friends who fit the Business or STEM Major from Big State College were being smug about it. We're a liberal arts university whose biggest majors are art, music, theatre, and education, no loving poo poo our graduates aren't making the big bucks. Pretty sure nobody dreams of being an elementary school teacher rolling in the dough. The term "starving artist" has been around for a long time, dudes, nobody is going to be surprised. Plus, not every STEM field is hopping in demand. I study evolutionary biology--aside from scant positions at colleges and natural history museums, I may as well become an overqualified biology tutor. My advisor specializes in snake systematics but he told me to play up any other areas I'm good at (such as microbiology) to increase my chances of getting a job after my Ph.D.
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Apr 5, 2014 20:57
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gmcsonoma posted:My school offers "regular" 3 hour lecture courses and "hybrid" 2 hour lecture/1 hour online component courses. The thing is, there's no criteria for what constitutes an online component. What this means in practice is that my "regular" accounting course requires 2 extra hours a week of online reading and quizzes worth 40% of my grade, while my "hybrid" communications course had the prof lecturing right up until the 2 hour mark with no additional online component or online assignments I've had one that was very similar to your first example, 2.5 hours of lecture a week and an insanely busy online component that takes far more time. But then again I have a "hybrid" course next semester that meets for 3 hours once at the end of the semester for what I'm assuming is a final and everything else is online. It seems like online courses have been around long enough that some standards would be in practice, but here we are. I'm taking a wholly online web "programming" class right now that has taken up exactly 40 minutes of my time since the semester began in January. It feels like a waste of money, but an easy A in a required course is an easy A I suppose.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:23
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Kontradaz posted:Thats why you don't major in a useless major. Not everyone goes to college with a motivation for money. Yeah, some people take guaranteed money majors, but in my experience, the better stem and humanities majors are those who have a passion for it and accept that they won't live a disgustingly affluent lives with these paths. Okuteru has a new favorite as of 04:10 on Apr 6, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 23:56
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And, God forbid, some people get an education for the sake of being educated. It doesn't fly so well when the economy is broken. But back (in the UK at least) when things were cheaper/government funded, why not get an education in something that interests you and then find a perfectly normal middle class job? But nope, if you aren't advancing as fast as you can, you're an unemployable failure.
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Apr 6, 2014 02:15
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Yeah, my sister got a pretty sweet internship at a biofuel research lab. She left to be a public defender because "Pouring gunk into other poo poo is boring as hell."
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Apr 6, 2014 23:47
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My school does not know how to handle registration at all. Last time they said it opened at 7 a.m. - 5:15! This time, 6:15! And not to mention every goddamn seat in every goddamn class is reserved (I'm mostly taking entry level courses because I'm undeclared and choosing between two majors) because we're taking way more students in next semester than we can even house, to the point where people are protesting on campus about the lack of housing. I had to stay up all night to even have a shot at getting any of the classes I wanted and I got none because I was two minutes off
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Apr 7, 2014 12:24
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I know that sending out "There's been a shooting at the corner of X and Y on campus, avoid the area" messages every few weeks can't be good for morale, but I don't think that changing the template to "Increased police activity at the corner of X and Y on campus, avoid the area" is an improvement.
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Apr 7, 2014 14:54
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Why is there at least one person in every class that thinks he or she will get away with plagiarizing Wikipedia? Bonus points if the cut & pasted content contains intentional inaccuracies 
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Apr 7, 2014 15:06
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Lottery of Babylon posted:I know that sending out "There's been a shooting at the corner of X and Y on campus, avoid the area" messages every few weeks can't be good for morale, but I don't think that changing the template to "Increased police activity at the corner of X and Y on campus, avoid the area" is an improvement. Where do you go that there are multiple shootings a month on campus?
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Apr 7, 2014 15:21
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Kavak posted:Where do you go that there are multiple shootings a month on campus? Philadelphia's a fun city.
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Apr 7, 2014 15:26
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