If you doubt the dogma you get an F
Don’t take a sociology course at the University of Auckland.
No doubt Bible colleges operate like that (and thus probably render their degrees useless for most secular career purposes), but you wouldn’t expect a real university to.
I wonder if administrators are squirming in their chairs as we speak.
Updating to add:
I don’t know about administrators, but even from 1000km away I am. JFC on a stick.
Same except more km away.
One of the twitter commenters says something along the lines of ‘this is fine, if you take a class on neoliberal economics you can’t write a socialist essay and expect to get credit, same as any other class’
Uh yes you damn well should expect to get credit for that, if your ‘socialist essay’ engages with the ideas of neoliberal economics as presented in the class and demonstrates an understanding of the material. The fact that you did it in a critical manner is irrelevant. You’re there to learn the material, not to profess agreement.
Ha I know I saw that one and a similar one and retorted to the similar one. Rather heatedly.
No, correction, I replied to the socialist one.
Speaking of neoliberal economics. I wonder how much the ‘reforms, of the 80’s and 90’s is responsible for all this [waves arms around].
Back when I was finishing at Uni, nearly all my class talked about the joy of learning, of developing critical thinking skills, of experiencing new ideas. We had just one student that openly professed that they were there to learn a skill to get a job – nothing more. By the time I’d been working for five years or so, and the reforms were well and truely in full swing, the majority of summer students and graduates joining our lab had noticeably moved into the ‘education was for job skills’ group.
In the years since I, and other now old colleagues have noted a slide into graduates being increasingly nice, well rounded people with a strong sense of work-life balance; but with vocational skills, rather than thinking skills. What’s more, many of them don’t seem curious about the world. They’re also all happy to choose one side or other of the culture debate/war, but seem to find it very hard to articulate why, or what they think the fairest and strongest argument their opponents are.
For all their worldly knowledge that I certainly lacked at that age, they’re actually remarkably easy to bamboozle because they don’t even perceive they have blindspots.
Sigh. Now get off my lawn.
When I was in my doctorate, I wrote a paper that disagreed with the position my instructor took on a subject, and used his own words from papers he’d written to illustrate my points. I got an A on the paper. He told me he was rethinking the issue, and was looking up some of the sources I used (with as many papers as he wrote on the topic, I was shocked he hadn’t found some of those sources).
That’s how education works. It’s give and take, it’s debate and discussion, it’s questioning of received wisdom. The student may find there are places that they have to acceded to certain expectations (This week I counted a student wrong for saying the earth is 6,000 years old – no evidence to support it), but overall, the idea should be to THINK.
A lot of my students want to skip any critical thinking questions and just respond to multiple guess and fill in the blank.
Rob, I think you’re right on the mark. One of my deans told me school isn’t about education, it’s about learning a trade. That’s fine if you’re teaching welding, but for those of us in Academic Ed, we have a responsibility to teach thinking. People who learn to think and question may very well turn out to be better welders, but even if they don’t, they will be better friends, neighbors, and citizens. And won’t kill themselves by getting medicine from Goop. (By the way, I never figured out what was wrong with telling someone to get off your lawn. It is your lawn, right? Just for the record, the kids next door play on my lawn, on my driveway, and so forth, and I never chase them away, but it seems a little bogus to say I have to put up with it. And I did get quite perturbed when they dognapped my puppy for an afternoon).
Unfortunately the tweet image cuts off too much of the essay to yield meaningful understanding.
I once taught a course that included material I had decided opinions about, and students couldn’t help but have been aware of that. One young man, possibly just to stir the pot, submitted a well-researched and well-documented paper drawing the exact opposite conclusion to what I would have argued. He got a high score (almost perfect–it was an extremely well-researched and well-argued paper–though turning it in late cost him some points).
Where is there any indication that giving the “wrong” answers leads to a poor grade?
Alan, that would be the line after the questions that says “(Essays that take a ‘gender critical’ position on transgender or question the validity of trans identities will be failed)”.
It’s pretty remarkable.
Just a couple of years ago, I submitted my rought draft for a final paper. My chosen topic was on the dangers of trans ideology to women and children. Along with her critique, my prof included the comment that my language needed to be reviewed because it seemed that I was being critical of gender ideology. So, I wrote the final version even more clearly to make sure that there was no mistake, and I was prepared for a low grade. She scored it with an “A” and no comment.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
GW @ 8 – Yes, but all you have to do is click on the tweet then click on the screenshot. It’s not THAT arduous.
(Though I do prefer images that don’t require clicking. But some of them do.)