What the fuck did you just say? [Student Thread]

[Onep]

Thankfully, Calvin sums it all up so neatly:

I totally get this. I'm still only in highschool, but in my advanced english class earlier in the year, we had to write a 6 page essay on the Jane Austin novel, Emma. We only got told what the essay was about on the day of the examination and we had two and a half hours to write it. I absolutely hated the book so I only read about a quarter of it. Instead I looked up the key themes in the novel, studied them for a week before hand and when I got to the essay, I wrote down a whole bunch of long words I remembered the teacher using to describe the novel, added a few of the themes I read about and I was done.
A month later I got my results; I was top of my class and had wrote "one of the most complex and comprehensive essays" that the teacher had ever seen on the novel. My teacher also said that I must have "read and reread the novel several times to gain such a level of understanding."
Honestly I still don't understand half of what I wrote.

Isn't it wonderful how you can transform something so inane and dreary, drag it through a slaughterhouse of buzzwords and themes, and come out with an "amazing" essay? Countless times I've gone to an exam thinking I was doomed, I vomit out paragraph after paragraph, and then the professor announces there were only two 'A's on the exam. And low and behold, I was one of them. Perhaps I under estimate myself, but is the refuse I spill out on these exams really that much better than everyone else?
On my most recent mid-term I literally hadn't finished a single chapter on either of the books and I still managed the get the highest score in the class. I even went in sleep-deprived having spent the entire night crafting an exam for another class.

Perhaps I'm just disenchanted with the process. I suppose I'm learning... something? Honestly, at this point I just want to finish my degree and get on with my dead-end career.

[jordancoles]

There's bank loans and federal loans. For the most part you want to entirely avoid bank loans, they'll fuck you over. Federal loans are marginally better due to lower interest rates, plus you don't start accruing interest or have to make a payment until you get your degree or drop out. Unfortunately, federal loans are only available to the least financially fit.

Anyone here can apply for OSAP (it's called something different outside of Ontario) but the amount you get is based on your parent's income, your marital status and if you live at home or not. The shitty thing is that even if you're getting no financial support from your parents, their income detemines your loan amount because OSAP assumes all parents support their children. They also assume you're working fulltime the entire summer between loan payments, so that affects funding for the next term lol. Oh also also, they don't tell you this, but there's daily interest that's added even during the 6 month period after graduating where you're not required to make your monthly payments.

A 30k debt (average for someone living away from home that got a 2 year diploma) translates to $2 per day and when you're making monthly payments, that interest is still being added daily throughout the month.
OSAP will lower the monthly payments if you can't afford the normal amount significantly, but it barely covers the daily interest costs. This is how people end up with endless student debt.

Fucking cancer, man

[Adder1234]

In Australia, we have a pretty good university system. We have the option of either paying up front, or paying it over time through HEX, meaning that we pay it off over time, with little or no interest, and we don't even have to start paying until we earn over the minimum wage. Not to mention we have things like youth allowance, which is money that we get from the government for being younger than 25 and living away from home and earning under the minimum wage. Then we have a tonne of scholarships (I've already worked out how to pay my entire course using only scholarships) and most universities have on campus accommodation for full time students, which can also be paid for with scholarships.

Only problem with all of these things is that a lot of people abuse it, my friend at uni met a 35 year old who has been at uni for 15 years, just living of social security. But that's always been a problem in this country; if you're smart about it, you can earn more money from social security than you can from a minimum wage job.

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

Good book on this kind of subject is Intellectuals and Society by Thimas Sowell. Reading it rn and it's pretty good.

This one time I had this Philosophy textbook that the prof had co-authored, so whenever we went to the text book he would just low key shit talk the other authors and explain all the shit he wasn't allowed to put into it.

He was a good guy, though; he always wanted to argue with people and so would take the exact opposite stance as them then roast them with all the argument skills that come with a a PHD is philosophy. Somedays he was a Nazi and others he was an SJW, you could never tell.

[Jalpha]

I've experienced both sides of the coin. Within IT I found most learning material over-complicated simple concepts greatly slowing down the learning process. If I could explain the concept more simply I don't know why they didn't just explain it that way in the first place.

Then, in Agriculture, I encountered learning material which had been so dumbed down that much of the meat of the subject, details which I found fascinating and important, were entirely absent. I suppose they were catering to the capabilities of their student base.

In both circumstances I found that kissing up to instructors was the best way to get high marks. Sure you needed a basic grasp of the topic, but if the instructors liked you high marks would be incoming guaranteed.

My problem with the education system isn't so much that key details are obfuscated and hidden within the documentation, in some effort to keep knowledge exclusive I am sure, but instead that education revolves around filtering a sea of information for the relevant pieces and regurgitating them as opposed to creating new and worthwhile ideas. Turning higher education into a source of income was a mistake. In the vast majority of fields a college education would suffice for all practical purposes. Universities should have been kept as the path to original, creative thought and new ideas.

[jordancoles]

Universities should have been kept as the path to original, creative thought and new ideas.

I think that that is what they are going for when they break out the edgey social justice warrior discussions

If you take any university level class that has the ability to discuss even a small spectrum of topics you will notice that the discussions eventually move towards society, race, ethnocentrism and white privilege. These discussions are used to paw at the 'higher end' of education that people like to feel so smug about, and they keep hipsters in their respective coffeeshops until closing time

[Adder1234]

In both circumstances I found that kissing up to instructors was the best way to get high marks. Sure you needed a basic grasp of the topic, but if the instructors liked you high marks would be incoming guaranteed.

While this was true for me in primary and middle school, my highschool has an independent board of markers, who never even meet the students, so favouritism never plays a part. I do most of my subjects through distance education and they have a pretty good system going.

[Glorthan]

What are you studying? Doesn't sound like STEM.

Exactly, do a real degree and the problem disappears.

[Zeler]

What are you studying? Doesn't sound like STEM.

Exactly, do a real degree and the problem disappears.

Not everyone is able to be a quantum physicist like you and your brother.

[iamahh]

reminds me of this video: https://youtu.be/R_VlWQa0lpc

each person have their inclinations but sometimes people forget to simplify the message