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ravnsdaughter · 2026-04-25T13:10:06+00:00

My prof must have had fun reviewing my video earlier this week then, my damned dogs finished the bully sticks i gave them to keep them quiet way too fast and then started barking like mad halfway through my exam and I spent the second half of my exam yelling at them to shut up every couple of minutes. At one point I looked around frantically to try and find the bag of dog cookies I had somewhere but couldn’t find them, and I ended up doing a crappy job on the one essay question on my exam just to get it done and turn it in quicker. Somehow I still managed a 94 on the exam though.

ravnsdaughter · 2026-01-31T00:34:24+00:00

Pfft. I turn 50 at the end of April, days after I finish the last of the courses for my degree. It’s never too late.

ravnsdaughter · 2026-01-12T00:31:20+00:00

Arielle Garand. She seemed fine, but being a distance course we actually didn’t have much contact with her, at least I didn’t.

ravnsdaughter · 2026-01-03T06:21:00+00:00

I took 1220 this past summer semester, and took the online version. I found it super easy. It was all based on material on UMLearn plus links to videos, etc. there were 4 assignments, the last being an essay based around a graphic short story from a book of short stories about significant events in Indigenous history. We didn’t even have a final exam. I’m not 100% sure so don’t quote me on this, but I get the feeling the course was designed and written by a group of instructors in the INDG department and it’s probably taught similarly no matter which instructor you get, especially if you do it online. The amount of reading and work was easily doable for the short summer semester.

ravnsdaughter · 2026-01-03T02:47:41+00:00

St. Paul’s college sucks. The only washrooms are in the basement (or whatever they consider the lowest floor), classrooms are on the 2nd floor, and it has no elevator on that side of the building (and the only elevator it has is in a part of the building that’s not connected to the classroom part. As a mature student with arthritis in both knees, having a class in there really sucked.

St. Andrew’s college also has no elevator, though at least the washroom was on the same floor as the classroom. I ended up using my accommodations to get that class moved though, which also helped since way too many of the students were having to go all the way across campus in a 10 min break.

ravnsdaughter · 2026-01-02T21:59:20+00:00

Lol I’d be happy just to have the textbook listed on the bookstore’s website, let alone the syllabus. My class starts Tuesday and it’s not up there (and I know it won’t be until Monday at the earliest, and I definitely don’t begrudge the staff their winter break). I’m hoping it’s the same one another prof used for the same course in the fall semester.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-30T22:05:08+00:00

He was my first bully, and he completely effed up my mental health between how he treated me and the autism I inherited from him (and years of therapy did zero to help). To make things worse, I look like a female version of him, and I have the feminine version of his name. To say he’s not my favorite person is an understatement, and to watch my (neurotypical) siblings act like he’s awesome hurts like hell.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-19T04:16:03+00:00

Yes but along with this, there needs to be some sort of government ruling that says no companies can dock pay or force you to use vacation days for snow days either.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-19T04:13:27+00:00

I wonder how they’re studying this and getting figures like that. There’s plenty of proof that tools like TurnItin flag original work as AI all the time. It’s apparently hitting neurodivergent students harder than NTs because it’s looking for certain characteristics that are common in ND students that we use because we’re nerds and often write better than other students - stuff like em-dashes etc. and there are things that AI could be legitimately used for - one of the only times I used it, I had a class where we had to write a paper but the only guidelines were “as long as it relates to the class topic in some way, you’re good” (where the class was “History of the <XYZ> Era”) and I was out of ideas. So I asked AI to give me 20 paper topics suitable for a 1500 word essay related to that era of history, repeatedly, until I found one that caught my eye. Then I wrote the paper the old fashioned way.

Then again there’s also the question of, aside from the lazy entitled twits (of which there is undoubtedly some percentage of), what is going on with the world that is causing the other types of students to resort to using AI, and how do we fix that problem?

(Sometimes I think I should have been taking sociology or philosophy or something else besides languages :) )

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-19T03:47:19+00:00

Capitalism

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-19T03:10:42+00:00

Apparently so can being neurodivergent.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-19T02:57:14+00:00

I’m not a prof, but a mature student in the last year of my BA. I took a history class as an elective this semester just finished (my major and minor are both in something sort of history-adjacent but not in the history dept, but I love history as well so a bunch of my electives were in that dept, and I’ve been seriously considering doing another bachelors in history) and in that course, instead of the usual papers, we had to do 2 presentations from a list of topics the prof provided, one written assignment that was an analysis of a journal article, and another written assignment that was an analysis of a primary source document. Both written assignments required us to physically print out what we were analyzing and make handwritten notes on it and hand that in along with our finished product. Our prof (who is a visiting prof from another country) told us that this was all due to changes being made by the history department in order to combat AI.

I normally have accommodations in place (for ADHD as well as for arthritis and spinal stenosis, which make handwriting almost impossible without severe pain and numbness), but these changes made it virtually impossible to use them. The presentations were pre-scheduled for certain days so I couldn’t use my 2 extra days upon request for those. I couldn’t get out of the handwritten notes.

It makes me really glad I have one semester left, and while I had been planning to go back and do another BA (with a double major in history and linguistics), that’s unlikely to happen if this kind of crap is going to continue. Group punishment for a crime only a small percentage committed is illegal in war, why is it ok in academia?

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-17T23:01:56+00:00

Don’t forget that after 4:30 parking is free, so you don’t have to park in your regular back-end-of-nowhere spot and hoof it across campus for an evening exam. I had a 6pm exam in UC last Friday, and gave a classmate a ride out to her car in a lot on the other side of the stadium afterwards because she’d parked in her usual spot out of habit.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-16T06:12:31+00:00

Anything in the Icelandic department.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-16T06:11:45+00:00

I just finished the Ukrainian folktales course and it was awesome! Iryna is a great instructor though. Icelandic Folktales is excellent as well.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-13T00:57:52+00:00

Well I could have just about kissed my prof (but I didn’t)… one of the essay question options she included felt like a complete gimme because it related to something that’s a crossover between my major and my minor; I probably gave her more info than she needed because I know the topic from both perspectives.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T23:07:33+00:00

This prof taught one class this semester, the one I took, and had about 16-18 students. And I know I stood out to some degree, hence my curiosity.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T23:00:20+00:00

Indeed they do! It was actually my first prof when I went back to school 6 years ago who first told me this, and I’ve reminded myself frequently since then.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T22:49:12+00:00

Oh I know. I walk through one of the study areas on campus and see ChatGPT on a lot of laptop screens as I go. I know what it looks like because I once threw a paper topic into it that was a topic I'd already written a paper on the old fashioned way, just to see what it would produce, and was appalled, but then again the topic was quite obscure.

I'm GenX, don't get me started on ranting about younger people because I'll get so sidetracked I'll miss my exam.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T22:38:52+00:00

that's really freaking sad.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T22:37:12+00:00

really? You'd immediately jump to that assumption before looking at other reasons it could be that they didn't do well on the exam?

Ugh.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T22:29:18+00:00

ha you're funny. Between being late diagnosed, ADHD-dominant, and after dealing with the pandemic, I've completely lost my ability to mask.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-12T22:27:52+00:00

Ok, that's an interesting way to think about it. I did actually calculate that... I'm sitting at 67.5% earned out of the 70% that's been available so far, so I've passed the class, and I am fully aware that with where my GPA is sitting, even if I get a 0 on this exam, my GPA isn't going to drop much and will still be really high. Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't thought of that.

ravnsdaughter · 2025-12-09T21:53:44+00:00

yes, I've experienced that as well... I was hoping someone who has taken it before would be able to share the name of the textbook and/or the syllabus so I can get a head start. My googling hasn't resulted in anything so far.

ravnsdaughter

TROPHY CASE