chapotraphouse

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

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

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

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.

Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t live in the USSR/Russia, where the exams in universities were/are predominantly oral, several times a semester.

You are expected to demonstrate your understanding the topic you study broadly and in depth, and that means you should be able to answer just about any questions asked about the topic.

You draw a “ticket”, which contains a few questions on the paper, everyone in the class then gets a couple hours to solve, then the professors (usually several in the same room) will randomly choose one of you to get to the front, present your prepared answers, and get grilled by the professors until they are satisfied.

There are more tickets than there are students, so no two student will ever get the same problems/questions. These cover pretty much everything taught during the semester.

There is no way to cheat, no way to skim through the course. You must know your subject well, or else just don’t bother at all until you are ready. Throughout your course, you are expected to go through several dozens of “tickets”. You get used to it eventually.

Not to say they don’t come with their own problems and downsides, and the quality of the teachers and the education system in general matter, but there is a reason why the USSR (and still today’s Russia) produces some of the best specialists in the world.

Going through university while mentally ill is a horrible experience. So fun having to email professors asking for extra time on an assignment here and there because I had an episode and effectively being told 'tough shit'. Very cool, thanks! I love how callous the entire institution is!! Reminds me why I never reach out for help in the first place. I don't know how quite to articulate it, but something about the way higher education works feels so antithetical to the process of learning, but maybe the experience of NTs is very different.

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

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

To bei honest, I highly favour oral exams. This semester I had to chose between a 20 page termpaper or a 20 minute oral exam, which was a no-brainer to me. Writing a termpaper clashes with my ADHD. I have to keep tabs on like 15 books and the according notes and work on the project virtually uninterrupted for ~1 month without any kind of feedback until I hand it in? Thats a nightmare... Oral exams on the other hand are awesome. I can read like 2 books in the matter in around a week (because I don't need to take notes) for preparation and can just geek out with my professor about the topic. I think I just favour the conversation style of the exam, when my prof reacts to my answer I can infer if it was right or if I should come back to it. I don't think your opinion is wrong or something, but different flavours of neurodivergency have different needs. I really like that more offen than not I can choose the category of my exam :)

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:

1. I get to go home and not care about it at all

2. I get something in return for my suffering

3. 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.

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 :/

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?????

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.