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My experience with education is that you are often forced to write in order "to please" the teacher, rather than express yourself (if you want the proper degree

• r_singh 7y ago
  Going to school and college in India, I always thought it would be better in the west, where I assumed teachers would, on average, be more open minded towards different opinions from students. Cause bias against opinions expressed in writing assignments was a concern I had too.
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    I just avoided classes that had writing assignments because I was tired of having to ape the teacher's opinions.
    • chmod775 7y ago
      I often had opinions very unlike those of my ethics teacher and she gave me decent grades anyways as long as I made reasoned arguments. Depends on the subject really. It's probably not a good idea to try any stunts in history etc.
      • sdenton4 7y ago
        You might enjoy this song, "how I failed ethics" by the magnetic fields. https://youtu.be/Hu5dEXZ7DOY https://youtu.be/Hu5dEXZ7DOY "Though majoring in Visual and Environmental Studies And minoring in History of Sci I had to retake Ethics from my Mennonite professor For whom my skepticism didn't fly. "The first time I made mincemeat of the standard propositions Establishing a so-called moral science And I declared morality an offshoot of aesthetics And got a failing C for my defiance."
    • salawat 7y ago
      I have never really felt compelled to "ape" a teacher's opinions. Demonstrate a sufficient and working understanding of? Yes; which I guess could be considered aping. However I can't recall a time I've been outright penalized for challenging a teacher's take as long as some greater mistake in making my case was not at the same time undertaken. For instance, the misapplication of logical device, or tortured cherrypicking of data/context. I've never professed to understand why many people view academia as an institution in which the end goal is to agree with the professor for the grade. I've always treated it as an institution for the search for answers to questions where the searching for good questions is arguably more important and more difficult than finding the answers. I can't count the number of times I've felt dejected because I've had an armload of data or observations that are somehow related, and I've not been able to do anything but stew in angst because while there was some meaning to it, I could never figure out how to formulate the question to which the observations were the answer. Then again, I stuck around long enough for my Bachelor's, then got out. I might not have gotten to the point where there is a much higher stake in tipping the Professor's Sacred Cow.
      • WalterBright 7y ago
        > I've never professed to understand why many people view academia as an institution in which the end goal is to agree with the professor for the grade. I didn't believe it either until I experienced it personally.
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    For me it depended heavily on the professor. Some marked me down almost assuredly because I argued against their preferences. Then again, one professor would keep running arguments in their grading of my papers just to end it with "Disagreed with everything you wrote, excellent arguments. A"
• chinesempire 7y ago
  > My experience with education is that you are often forced to write in order "to please" the teacher It, honestly, doesn't sound true. Teachers have ego, yes, but they also can recognise value in student's work, even if it doesn't please them. Of course the wrong answer is wrong, even if the student put a lot of effort in it.
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    Many students interpret bad grades in writing assignments as bias on the teachers’ part. That can happen, but more often the position or argument expressed isn’t necessarily derived from knowledge. Aping the teacher/professor is the fast path, not only for the purposes of being agreeable, but because the argument is well thought out at some level. Part of the educational processes is being able to make an argument that you don’t agree with.
  • will4274 7y ago
    Humans are able to fill in the blanks on arguments that they already understand and do so implicitly without even noticing. So, if you make an argument the professor agrees with and is familiar with, you can skip steps, and the professor will still grok it. If your argument is novel or unfamiliar, missing steps appear as logical leaps, even though those same missing steps appear as extraneous detail to somebody already familiar with the argument.
    • chinesempire 7y ago
      > If your argument is novel or unfamiliar ... you probably are a genius! Students usually talk about things they don't know, understand or can relate to (yet). Or, as Alan Kay put it > Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right"
• sdan 7y ago
  This can definitely play a role. Over the past several semesters all I've been doing is writing whatever the teacher wants to hear: their interests, political leanings, ideologies, everything. Why? Because it works and because I'm trying to "hack" the system, in PG's words. Back to the point, I think some students may very well just write whatever they think the teacher wants to hear and compounded with those extra credit points, you get selection bias in it of itself. The teacher may have a point, but maybe take it with a grain of salt. As a teen I see a ton of people using their phones constantly and decided to go cold turkey after my junior year (no social media except twitter to stay up to date with ML research and HN for cool articles). Now instead of spending time addicted to whatever everyone else is, I spend a ton more time coding and learning cool stuff.
• hanniabu 7y ago
  My biggest peeve is the length requirements with writing. There's no need for fluff unless you're going into literature. People need to learn how to succinctly get their point across. I remember we'd have reports where we need to write 10 pages and I would finish everything in 4 pages and have no idea what to do after that and then it just becomes a game of bullshitting to draw it out. Same thing with essays where it needs to be a page long and I'm able to answer on a paragraph.
  • BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    We had informal requirements (or better, "expectations") for the length of a PhD thesis (physics). It was about 200 pages. Mine was a whooping 40 pages. Introduction to the subject was two sentences and the fact that if you need an introduction to the matter you should probably not be reading this thesis which deals with a super specialized area. One of the reviewers refused to read it on the basis of the size. The four others looked relieved not to have to go though the history of physics again. I hope that things are changing in this age of blogs and concerned information, the French idea of a thesis made of published articles and a few pages of glue is great.
  • hos234 7y ago
    You should be able to make that case to your prof. You would probably get points for it :) Some profs are subject matter experts who have no actual understanding of Pedagogy. So they pick up whatever rules someone else tells them to use, and then with time figure out what works and doesn't from feedback (which students are always very hesitant to give).
  • neltnerb 7y ago
    I have actually repeatedly heard the same complaint from professors. They don't want to read a bunch of 20 page papers when the standard in the field for (technical) publications is like 4. So they put maximum page limits on, which makes vastly more sense all around. Maybe in philosophy it's necessary because the standard media is books or long essays so making sure you can play the "game of bullshitting" is a useful vocational skill in that field, to make your text long enough for people to buy your book. No offense intended to philosophers, I love philosophy. But practical considerations like earning a living from a philosophy degree are perhaps different. It's kind of hard to sum up a new philosophical treatise in four pages since you'd probably take that long just to define your version of what "good" means.
• awild 7y ago
  It sounded like the papers were ungraded. Which is something I encountered a few times in philosophy seminars and really appreciate.
• analog31 7y ago
  Today, students should write "to please" future employers and social credit rating algorithms.
• WWLink 7y ago
  I had a class or two taught by a teacher like that, but the majority of the time this wasn't the case.