“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.
In college right now for an animation course in engineering.
We were literally thaught how to make AI slop (deepfakes, AI generated images) by the professors assistant since the professor refused to show up. He went on how this “won’t replace us” and how It was “revolutionary” even though It looked like shit. Mind you he’s the same guy who told us “Don’t pirate Windows, buy It for 5€.”.
Sometimes I think of dropping out and going freelance as an artist even though I’m only a month into my first year. Though I’m very afraid how and where to promote my stuff
It’s very scary how “flying by the seat of their pants” and low quality higher education seems to be. We really are having a capitalist education crisis.
Honestly as a self acclaimed AI hater i feel like Animation is one actual decent use case for generative AI. Like you make the art like normal and then have the AI generate extra frames for you that are just slightly edited. Like moving an arm or whatever. But ya just fully generating something is stupid. Hope the animation thing goes well for you whatever you decide to do.
That’s already how animation works, except it uses normal math and algorithms to interpolate and generate frames. Frame generation using machine learning is good for generating frames for old film from when really low framerates where the only thing possible.
Pretty much, there’s a good video from a year or so ago on why frame generation for animation doesn’t work:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
i’m not sure that i agree that oral exams are inherently bad, i just think they need to be taken with the instructor having a spirit of charitability and recognising that students can’t remember every little detail. evidently this wasn’t the case with you but the typical exam paper format isn’t very good for neurodivergent students either in a very different way, like i’d always do awfully in exams by my standards so obviously i’d be more inclined to think that format is worse than oral.
It really depends for me. I like practical exams, but it’s the interview type set up that’s giving me anxiety. I suck at written exams too, but les than when I’m being stared at and judged
Absolutely! My prof said it’s a bit tricky because he needs to feel for gaps if he wants to give a high mark but he will look for what’s actually known to give a passing grade. So he tries to steer the conversation according to clues you might drop in your answers, but can’t overlook mistakes or should-be-known.
I really like oral exams more than written because of ADD, but if we think outside that dichotomy than having the students write something they taught themselves would be much better. But that requires a lot of educators in even a mid-sized class.
The only thing that school taught me is how to withstand constant immense suffering. Most of anything useful, I learned on my own terms.
Work on the other hand is pretty easy, mainly because no matter how shit the workday is:
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I get to go home and not care about it at all
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I get something in return for my suffering
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I know what I am doing is not completely pointless, because someone has decided to pay me for it
So I guess thank you school, for making the most shit material conditions seem like a blessing in comparison.
Under capitalism, education, particularly elementary, middle and highschool, are mostly set up to teach you how to be a good little obedient worker accept your exploitation under capitalism. It also makes people associate learning or doing anything outside their “place” with horrible times. Works a treat.
Did you not get to go home after school?
In my experience a lot of people find work liberating compared to school because the school kept them stressed out all the time after class is over. You’re supposed to do work on your own and prepare to perform well, you can’t forget about school after you’re out of school. This can indeed happen with work but it is more widely recognised as abusive, while it is absolutely normalized with school
Edit : network problem, posted it twice
homework
In my experience a lot of people find work liberating compared to school because the school kept them stressed out all the time after class is over. You’re supposed to do work on your own and prepare to perform well, you can’t forget about school after you’re out of school. This can indeed happen with work but it is more widely recognised as abusive, while it is absolutely normalized with school
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I’d like to consider myself a freak with an amazing memory but, yeah, that on the spot pressure/call-outs were especially rough in graduate-level sciences. I get the whole in-situ “determine the limits of your knowledge on the subject” but damn if it didn’t feel like the primary investigator of the lab I was in just saw me as a lab rat to poke and prod for his curiosity when I was presenting research updates.
Also not fun to learn I probably had test anxiety for my entire scholastic career & never had accomodations suggested to me until I was nearly done with my coursework :/
username etc etc
On the other hand as a person with adhd I love oral exams because then I don’t really have to pay attention in class. I can bullshit my way to a B-A+ with the bare minimum of academic effort. I’ll be able to yap so much they can’t ask any questions and then they’ll bemoan the fact we don’t have more time because I seem to have a wealth of knowledge hehehe.
Written exams though? Hello executive dysfunction
Ha, that rules (the being able to talk part, not the written exam dysfunction part. I feel you pain).
I guess our ADHD manifests in different ways, I get overwhelmed in interview type situations and end up forgetting which words I want to use “Uhh… I mean…nuh what’s the word for that again?”
I think it also depends on the course content and the level of technical knowledge.
Plus the oral exam set up, i.e. if you don’t hit all the required points by not effectively using your time to regurgitate the course content you fail.
That sucks! That happens to me too, but I try to yap thru it or jump to a different association. “I don’t recall the specific technical term at the moment, so let me instead describe the practice” (-3 minutes of interview time spent on something that is trivial to discuss) then I often end up doing something like “now when I describe it like this, it of course sounds quite similar to this, but they differ in key ways, which are…” Yapyapyap “oh you have a question professor?”
Another thing I do is tell them that I am nervous! It has only yielded positive results so far
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.
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Paper exams are bad enough fuck oral exams. Last one i did was oral German exam ages ago and I had rehearsed what I was going to say properly but the second i sat down my brain just went “nah” and i couldn’t remember a fucking thing.
What kind of exam method is that???
