chapotraphouse

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?????

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.

We don't have oral exams, at least not in my area. And if anything the dynamic here is the reverse. When you're permitted to look over your notes, then I'm not only looking at how much data you can bring to the fore but also how well you can utilize it in your essay. The standards rise with being able to look over notes.