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i have said for a while that school is basically a filter for people who can sit in a room doing mind numbing shit for 8 hours a day 5 days a week without
::: spoiler sui
killing themselves
Thinking back, the first thing that started my spiral in highschool and eventually snowballed into me dropping out was a mandatory public speaking assignment in a fucking health class during sophomore year. I was a pretty decent student up until then.
I had really bad social anxiety that no amount of "suck it up and get over it" would have fixed. I wasn't able to confront and remedy it until years later.
But yeah, forced to give an oral exam in front of a class of 30+, just skipped the entire class, took the F, my grades tanked to the point it was impossible to recover without repeating years and summer school. My mom already barely had enough money as it was, forget going to summer school. So I just dropped out.
The teacher was completely indifferent when I told her in private and gave me the whole "you either do it or fail" so yeah. A year later I dropped out. Life didn't really turn out much different had I graduated, though so there's that. Maybe I would've struggled less in my 20s, idk.
"Sink or swim" was a lingering shitty 
way to traumatize kids into swimming, and it's also a lingering shitty attitude for teaching in general.
It’s weird how little not having that piece of paper actually matters, especially if you just lie about it on job applications. (I dropped out because of depression)
I never understood "filter" classes, ones with failure rates >50%. Because to me it seems either the professors are fucking awful or that it's deliberately meant to be failed and retaken multiple times, charging full price each time
Some classes, acting to filter out students before they take higher level courses in a subject, makes sense to me.
If you cannot understand Organic Chemistry 101 as a freshman, perhaps Microbiology isn't the subject you should major in. If the worst student in med school still becomes a doctor, filtering these applicants is arguably a social good.
But. This only works when you remove the profit motive from universities. If there is no financial incentive to fail people, only reputation of the institution.
(I am neglecting the very real issues some people have with learning differences, poor primary education, etc. And as someone who is profoundly dyslexic myself, I can testify that these are real issues that need to be acknowledged. But again, a society that prioritized education as opposed to profit, that prioritized intellectual excellence instead of securing funding for sports, would go a long way towards mitigating those issues in the first place. If Texas spent more time and money on education, then they do on stadiums for example, students would be entering university with a well-rounded general education, instead of being barely literate, they would be in a position to take a difficult filter class and succeed or fail based on their merits instead of as a result of what zip code they were born in.)
I’m gonna recommend you check out a series published in Naked Capitalism called What If Medicine Were Taught Like a Science. It’s written by a microbiologist who has taught at medical schools for decades. Organic chemistry isn’t harder to understand than inorganic, we just teach it poorly so it acts as a filter class.
Cuba shows that we could create as many doctors as teachers each year, we just choose not to in order to artificially inflate their wages.
At the end of the day the core issue is the profit motive.
So long as education is gatekept to prevent social mobility, and doctors have a vested interest in keeping their numbers low and their salary high, we will have these issues.
Especially as college costs continue to go up.
In a communist Utopia, people will still fail organic chemistry. When the dictatorship of capitalism is abolished, people will still fail advanced math courses.
And that's okay. Individuals have different skills, different strengths and weaknesses, not everyone is equipped to be an astrophysicist.
But when you throw capital into the mix, when you turn University into a daycare for your young adults, And you structure society in such a way that without an advanced degree you are doomed to poverty, You have created a system with perverce incentives.
This means that the person who has the resources, even if they don't necessarily have the innate skill or desire, can brute force their way to a degree.
Whereas the next Einstein, the next Newton, the next Hubble, is working at a fast food joint, their mind preoccupied not with the mysteries of the universe, but with how they're going to pay their cell phone bill this month.
This morning, our generations Lenin had to wake up 2 hours early, take three buses, to arrive on time to a job that barely pays enough to survive. And instead of pontificating on theory, they are being ground down by poverty.
Sometimes it's because the Professors (who are, yes awful) feel there's a minimum level of knowledge to be taught and that's the barrier. Which might be fair, if University were free. And there are courses I struggled at because I didn't have to learn appropriate prerequisites that aren't usually taught until 2nd-3rd year (Partial Differential Equations and stuff beyond, mostly)
Ideally you could have 6-7 year BSc-Beng courses for difficult courses where it really is required to learn advanced math to even start learning the subject. Not every subject takes the same time to learn to a Bachelor's level and not every person, even extremely smart people, learn at the same pace.
To illustrate, the working class scientist Michael Faraday famously went through almost everything Maxwell did in electromagnetism in a qualitative way but his struggles with manipulating even basic arithmetic crippled his progress towards a unified theory (he might have done an end run around the Aether concept with just a bit of trigonometry). Imagine if he'd had another decade to work on it instead of having to get a job as an apprentice at age 14.
But see "free university" as a prerequisite for that.
I can tell you as a teacher that there is no method of assessment that does not disadvantage someone. Answering questions in writing in a quiet room is a nightmare scenario for somebody. For instance, I teach in a very poor area and have a lot of students with lagging writing skills who would be thrilled to have a chance to just talk through material they understand but struggle to express in writing. This is not to say that the education system under capitalism doesn't do a shit job generally with the neurodivergent, but that's mainly because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education that works for everyone, but differentiating for everyone's needs is hard and, ultimately, expensive. The bigger the class size, the smaller the staff, the less possible differentiation becomes, but of course, capital does not want to fund a robust education system.
New York State passed a law to reduce class sizes a few years ago, and the New York DOE just hasn't done anything to comply with the law. They're not hiring more teachers, they're not building more schools. They don't even have a plan to get to the required sizes. They're just 
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"
I see. Geez, I knew teachers were overworked and understaffed, but that sounds dire
If you're experienced, you learn ways to deal with it, and the school system can vary wildly from place to place in the US. But generally the the need for as few staff as possible to teach as many students as possible is in direct tension with every student getting their needs met.
This is why the bourgeoisie are increasingly turning to things like charter schools (essentially publicly-funded private schools), computerized instruction and, increasingly, AI, to try and solve this contradiction.
Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t live in the USSR/Russia, where the exams in universities were/are predominantly oral, several times a semester.
You are expected to demonstrate your understanding the topic you study broadly and in depth, and that means you should be able to answer just about any questions asked about the topic.
You draw a “ticket”, which contains a few questions on the paper, everyone in the class then gets a couple hours to solve, then the professors (usually several in the same room) will randomly choose one of you to get to the front, present your prepared answers, and get grilled by the professors until they are satisfied.
There are more tickets than there are students, so no two student will ever get the same problems/questions. These cover pretty much everything taught during the semester.
There is no way to cheat, no way to skim through the course. You must know your subject well, or else just don’t bother at all until you are ready. Throughout your course, you are expected to go through several dozens of “tickets”. You get used to it eventually.
Not to say they don’t come with their own problems and downsides, and the quality of the teachers and the education system in general matter, but there is a reason why the USSR (and still today’s Russia) produces some of the best specialists in the world.
Damn, harsh. I very much look up to those Soviet scientists.
I guess they got to try the class as many times as they wanted, and it was probably far cheaper too which is at least an upside. I think half of my anxiety about University comes from the fact that I'm financially struggling while going in to debt haha 
how much is it in Australia? over here you get paid by the government for being a uni student (20 dollars a month to some shawerma)
It's like 20k a year in debt
You get an allowance but it's like, below poverty line stuff.
Yeah I can imagine how a poorly taught class/university would not sufficiently prepare their students for this kind of exam.
Unless you've left something out, I feel like you're being unfair to the instructor here by assuming malice for giving oral exams. Have you voiced this concern with her? My reaction is that this instructor is putting enormously more effort into her students than she's being paid to, I'm not sure you realize how much more of a time investment that is.
I've had students come to me about test anxiety and if I trust that they have a decent understanding then I'll offer an option to test orally instead. A lot of students do much better with oral exams. It allows me to say okay, you can't answer this particular question, but I can probe adjacent things to give partial credit. I can see you do have some understanding of what the question is meant to test for, I realize that this specific detail is tripping you up and you would do fine with a question that didn't involve that one hiccup. With a written exam, I'm just grading on how well you answer the one question. It's not reasonable to take stabs at how much better you might do with a slightly different question, because that would be massively influenced by the biases of what I'm expecting out of you before the exam starts - it's hard for that not to end up at better grades for students I like more. I can't look beyond how well the steps you've written on the paper lead towards answering the question you were given.
In a better world I would offer them for everyone, but it's a massive time investment. I'm reluctant to make that offer unless I already have some confidence they're decent with the material, because if I give an oral exam and they're struggling it might be hard for me to not leak frustration with having two hours of my time burned for no benefit, and if they read that on me it won't help with test anxiety and won't be better for anyone.
Seriously, just start a dialogue with her about this in private.
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My final sociology exam to get a BA was a 4 hour exam where we had to sit down and write three 2000 word essays off of 6 random questions presented at the exam.
No notes allowed.
When the fuck will I ever have someone put a gun to my head and say 'reguiritate from memory these three topics with SOURCES and write them in pen, you have an hour'
Absolutely useless exam type. I still passed but it felt more like a speedrun than an actual test.
There's a teacher at our college who forces students to write 1000 page essays. Not around 1000, exactly 1000 words or else it's an automatic zero. This isn't so bad until you have to write on paper with a time limit and you have to fucking count it by hand.
Literally just ego-tripping bullshit to get people to fail for meaningless mistakes.
You had to source things by memory? What the hell lmao
Yeah in practice it meant just memorizing 6 entire essays and the studies associated with it and then hoping the marker could read my handwriting, which is awfull considering like 99% of the general public I do all my writing on a keyboard...
Writing 6000 words in 4 hours seems like a feat of athleticism even if typed on a computer.
That actually sounds like a form of torture
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This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand
I couldn’t have survived most of the time not doing this. Spend my summer researching random stuff and base much of my class work on that. Only way my AuDHD could make it.
That's worked for me to far too. I'm scared about 3rd year though. What if I'm too dumb to make it? 
Can you be strategic about it? Can you go through the course documentation and work out what you need for a bare pass? Then work upwards with whatever time and energy you have left? There isn't a magic formula, like, but this might take the pressure off just enough to (1) spend your time where you really need it and then (2) spend whatever time is left on what you enjoy most (and are therefore more likely to do better on).
I doubt very much you won't make it. You've got this.
Real. I’m scared I’m already reaching that limit.
Going through university while mentally ill is a horrible experience. So fun having to email professors asking for extra time on an assignment here and there because I had an episode and effectively being told 'tough shit'. Very cool, thanks! I love how callous the entire institution is!! Reminds me why I never reach out for help in the first place. I don't know how quite to articulate it, but something about the way higher education works feels so antithetical to the process of learning, but maybe the experience of NTs is very different.
If you're in the US, have you tried speaking to your "student success" representative, or the disabled students office? You may be able to get more time based on either health needs or learning disability needs. If you have been diagnosed (or can be) with ADHD at all, you should be able to get all kinds of assistance, extra time for exams, etc.
I did, but they told me it wasn't an option, even with the therapist note and documentation of PTSD I provided. Frustrating, but nothing else I can do. Thank you anyways though!
Sorry to hear. That sucks! I hope you can find some way to make it work for you.
No, it's antithetical to learning for NTs, too.
I think our entire approach to education and training is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up, like so many other systems in place.
The education system should be tailored to identify each person's passions, talents, and aptitudes from a much earlier age. I know peoples' preferences change but by the time you enter high school, you are old enough to start specializing for your future imo.
While kids still have access to the resources public education provides and the time to take advantage of them, we should be giving them every opportunity to explore everything they can learn and focus on learning what they like. And I definitely don't just mean 'practical' or 'utilitarian' skills. Some kid is an amazing painter? Let them triple the amount of art classes if they don't want to take a foreign language and math. Mathematician? Writer? Chemist? Same goes.
I understand a well rounded education is important so people can have a broader view of the world and understand the work other people do, but what we're doing now is wasting so much potential.
Super idealist I know, but how did we make a society where the kids are an afterthought? 
Nah, don't feel bad. Idealist or not, it's practical and rational to make sure your people are reaching their full desired potential. That's how you have a healthy strong society and probably one of the many reasons our current society is falling apart.
Yeah viewing public education as a 'money sink' or something that needs to be 'efficient' has trickled down into how some people view their own children as investments or liabilities.
Take all the money from defense funding and put it in education.
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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