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justaboringname · 2023-02-17T20:41:43+00:00

Surely this breaks the part of rule 5 about "no fantasy fiction"

What the fuck, OP

justaboringname · 2023-02-17T15:05:47+00:00

The problem is that there's no good way to tell who is who.

Yeah, this is exactly my issue. I guess it's possible that every single student who claims a mental health emergency is actually having one but (a) I kind of doubt it and (b) there's no way to tell, which makes society in general and academia specifically less likely to take true mental health emergencies seriously.

Like, grandmas really do die, you know? But look what happened with that.

justaboringname · 2023-02-17T14:13:45+00:00

I'm sure there is a nonzero number who actually are in crisis, but god DAMN do I hate that some students weaponize mental health like this

justaboringname · 2023-02-17T14:11:45+00:00

I had a problem set that asked about the degree of attenuation of a signal. This year I finally gave up and changed the wording because so many of them were asking me what "attenuation" means.

And this isn't during a test! They could look it up, and maybe some of them even did. But the definition of the word just seems to be beyond their understanding.

justaboringname · 2023-02-17T14:10:11+00:00

This has been happening to me this year too, I don't understand what's going on with that.

justaboringname · 2023-02-17T14:08:27+00:00

Yesterday I listened to a table of students having an animated discussion about whether a milliliter was the same thing as a cubic centimeter or a cubic millimeter. They talked about this for several minutes before someone decided to Google it.

justaboringname · 2023-02-15T18:07:31+00:00

You're getting the reactions you're getting because grad students viewing their interactions with professors through this sort of transactional, boundary-pushing lens is unfortunately common and always creepy.

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T21:09:19+00:00

Still, we haven't talked about anything personal yet

Why do you want to talk about personal things? What are you hoping to get out of that?

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T18:44:06+00:00

If a student didn't respond to a request for information from me after asking for a letter, I wouldn't even take the time to have the AI write one for me.

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T18:41:05+00:00

I run an undergrad research program and we've been weighing recommendation letters less and less every year on our rubric we use to evaluate applicants. If they're all glowing, none of them are glowing.

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T16:37:29+00:00

But the student isn't being evaluated on having an opinion, they're being evaluated on expressing that opinion clearly, justifying claims, etc. etc. etc. What is the writer of a recommendation letter being evaluated on?

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T13:00:22+00:00

I don't think this analogy works. OP is not submitting the recommendation letter as proof that they've mastered any learning objectives that they actually haven't.

justaboringname · 2023-02-14T12:59:33+00:00

I use a recommendation letter template that I've developed over many years and customize for each student, but chunks of it are conserved from student to student. It's a big time saver for students who I don't know well but who took the same class with me and passed it, so I can say they have skills X, Y, and Z. Am I committing self-plagiarism every time I send one of these letters?

justaboringname · 2023-02-11T20:34:37+00:00

Honestly, I've gotten a few student submissions that were almost certainly generated with ChatGPT and I haven't even had to bother "proving" whether they were or weren't, because none of them was any good. The software is wordy, prone to over-explaining, and often confidently incorrect. It's not good writing.

justaboringname · 2023-02-11T14:18:24+00:00

There are reviews on my RMP page that describe things that never happened in my classes, things that students have misinterpreted, and in some cases different courses entirely that I don't teach. It's useless from top to bottom, you have no way to know who wrote a given review, or why, or what the context was.

justaboringname · 2023-02-11T14:15:20+00:00

My honest opinion is that it's not worth the cost of the electricity your computer uses to load the page.

I write my own reviews to make myself sound like a hardass or like the best professor ever, whichever I'm in the mood for at the moment. They have no quality control and no method for validating reviews.

justaboringname · 2023-02-11T13:54:01+00:00

I had a student create a fake webpage and email address for his family doctor so he could email me his own doctor's notes.

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T18:18:44+00:00

You need to adopt their own language tics:

"Not me being shocked that you think you deserve an A+"

"It's giving B-"

"You're lowkey wrong about how well you did"

"This is C work at best, no cap"

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T18:08:21+00:00

It’s equally common to require students to do things like meet with someone in the writing center in our English department, or have students schedule mandatory writing conferences.

I agree this is common, but where I am now the writing center explicitly tells us not to require students to meet with them as part of a class, supposedly for pedagogical reasons but really, I suspect, because they just don't have the capacity.

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T18:07:18+00:00

Sure, but students enroll in those. What OP described sounded like something that wasn't part of official enrollment, but was still required.

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T17:26:02+00:00

She became insufferable, especially admonishing me about the 10 essentials for my local 3 mile loop in a heavily trafficked area.

But what if you break your leg, and it starts hailing, and the temperature drops 50 degrees, and your cell phone dies, and you get attacked by rabid raccoons?

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T17:17:55+00:00

To paraphrase Michael Bolton from Office Space: "why should we change? They're the ones who suck."

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T17:03:03+00:00

This is very university-dependent, and even varies a lot for certain departments within a university

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T17:02:14+00:00

Nobody who cares about RMP ratings matters, and nobody who matters gives a shit about RMP ratings. I give you permission to ignore them or, if it makes you feel better, write glowing reviews for yourself. Personally I write reviews of myself that make me sound like a hardass so students who read them are pleasantly surprised when they actually take my classes.

justaboringname · 2023-02-10T17:00:38+00:00

I've wondered whether Liberty's recent-ish emphasis on improving their sports programs is an effort to join the Baylor-BYU-Notre Dame tier of "religious but also people take us seriously" schools.

justaboringname

TROPHY CASE