Stupidity and Incompetence in Education
The cultlike hive mind cannot handle constructive criticism. No wonder things are such a mess.
Sorry, I have to put part of this behind a paywall; I don’t want crazy people hunting me down, and I also don’t want to be sued.
Let’s just say, for the folks not behind the paywall, that I was taking some master’s level classes at a low-cost online university. These courses SUCKED. I mean, SUCKED HARD.
They weren’t actually real classes. They were the weekly educational version of Sisyphus; for those of you who don’t know the Greek myth, I mean, that guy pushing rocks up a hill for eternity.
You’d get a reading list of a bunch of PDF files, some books, some chapter of books, some papers. The number of pages would average between, oh, 50 and 500 pages. Then you had three graded writing assignments in three different formats, all of which needed to have “citations.”
Let me make a side note about the citation issue. When I was first in school, back in the dark ages, plagiarism rules were simple: Make sure you attribute your quotes and don’t paraphrase someone else’s words without attribution.
Plagiarism was NOT about what it has become today in higher education: CITE EVERYTHING BECAUSE IDEAS ARE OWNED BY EXPERTS. In other words, don’t think independently, cede all your writing to outside authority, and cite as much as possible on every goddamn thing you type.
The citations take time, and so even though one of the formats was “discussion board,” these discussion board “thoughts” also had to be cited, and peer-graded, so you are looking at what is basically a term paper with references.
Ridiculous. Three cited papers per week is not easily doable for anyone but those who have nothing else at all going on in their lives. Or those who use AI, which is a common complaint of other students - that students are cheating by using AI to get through this nightmare workload.
Then you have to deal with peer review, and then possibly a volunteer instructor who is not getting paid and who might just grade your paper…also with AI.
I reduced my course load to one class from this “institution” (mind you, I’ve been handling two other graduate-level courses from two other schools with no problem). But that still wasn’t enough to lessen the heavy burden of this crazy courseload, for courses that didn’t even have any lessons in them!
In other words, the school doesn’t teach you jack. You are basically reading papers and writing papers. That’s the entire school experience.
Let me compare the workload between a 3-credit course from this school that doesn’t have any real classes vs. a real school - the bad school requires an equivalent of 3 papers per week x 8 weeks = 24 cited writing assignments for all master level classes (also for many undergrad courses too).
But my other school (that has a better accreditation and an actual campus you can visit) has a total of 9 writing assignments including discussion posts in an 8-week term for a 3-credit course (at least the one I checked in comparison).
Writing 24 perfectly cited papers every 8 weeks is a recipe for burnout. I also think it’s abusive, especially when you combine the workload with unsympathetic “professors.”