College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.
I always found this argument completely unsatisfactory…
Imagine someone coming up to you and saying “you must learn to juggle otherwise you can’t be a fisherman” and then after 14 years of learning to juggle, they say “you don’t actually need to know how to juggle, we just had to see if you CAN learn. Now I can teach you to fish.”
You’d be furious. But, because we all grew up with this nonsense we just accept it. Everyone can learn, there’s just tons of stuff that people find uninteresting to learn, and thus don’t unless forced; especially when the format is extremely dry, unengaging, and you’ve already realized… You’re never going to need to know how to juggle to be a fisherman… ever.
The show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” (IMO) accurately captures just how worthless 90% of that experience is to the average adult. I’ve forgotten so much from school, and that’s normal.
Also this is just ridiculous, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
You do realize you get to choose which courses to take in undergrad right? Universities aren’t forcing you to take any of the courses, you choose ones in subjects you are interested in, and first year is to get you up to speed/introduce you to those subjects, so you can decide if you want to study them further.
once you have a major or specialist, then yeah, you have some required courses, but they do tend to be things very relevant to what you want to do.
That’s not true at all, every degree has a required core curriculum at every university I’ve ever heard of (e.g., humanities, some amount of math, some amount of English, etc). It also says nothing for the K-12 years.
In my university you had breadth requirements, but it was 1 humanities course, 1 social science, and 1 science, and you could pick any course within those areas to fulfill the requirement. So you had a lot of choice within the core curriculum. Man, if other unis aren’t doing that, that sucks.
https://bulletin.uakron.edu/undergraduate/general-education/#associatedegreerequirementstext
That’s roughly 10-14 classes. Most universities I’ve seen the first 2 years is mostly general education with a little bit of your major involved. Then there’s your “college” requirements inside of the university, another 8 credits so 3-4 classes typically. Then the rest if your major credits, but that’s at least 1/3 of your time on non-major work, and a lot of your degree program is going to be adjacent not totally relevant work, so, it’s more than that.
yeah, that’s trash. I only had to take 2 out of 20 full credits out of my specialist.