chapotraphouse

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

I was able to get through college thinking that a Psych ba would allowe mr to improve my understanding of people

All it did was get me an ADHD diagnosis, a half-assed non-legit 'diagnosis' as autistic, and tons of money in debt with a field i will never be able to properly interact with

Its like playing morrowind for thr first time and putting all your points into Speed and then being unable to kill anything, this timr i cant just go back and timr and redo it lmao

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.

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

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.