“I decided we would do an oral exam* because it’s a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren’t just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers.”
Yeah and it’s also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn’t possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This “gotcha” style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I’ll ask a professor something and they’ll be like “I’ll have to look that up later and get back to you.” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don’t do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
Capital is interested in educating it’s workforce. It’s the whole reason we have a public education system in the first place.
I like everything else under capitalism though, there is a point of “diminishing returns” - Costco does not want to have to train its employees how to do basic arithmetic, but outside of ensuring that there are people it can hire, it has no incentive to ensure every member of society receives a good education.
In fact, capitalism requires “losers” in addition to “winners”. It requires people to fall out of the system, to be homeless and poverty-stricken, in order to force compliance on the rest of us. When a child with a profound learning disability fails out of high school, and spends their life precariously hopping from low wage job to low wage job, our education system is working as intended.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”