As much as I hate going to classes, there are a lot of things I’ve learned in them that I can genuinely say have made me a more intelligent person. There are other things, though, that make absolutely zero sense to me. Here they are:
Participation Grade
Unless it’s a public speaking class, I don’t understand why class participation is important. My sophomore year, I finished a class with a B- that got rounded up to a B. The reason that this happened is that, despite the fact that I received a 98 and a 95 on the two essays we had to write and a 93 on my homework grade, I got a 75 in class participation, which tanked my grade. It’s ridiculous that, even though I clearly knew what I was doing in the class, because I didn’t stick my nose up my professor’s asshole for fifteen weeks, I got a B.
Attendance Policies
I typically try to go to as many classes as I can because I genuinely won’t learn much. With that being said, though, there have been classes where I didn’t feel like I needed to go to a single one in order to get an A… except for the fact that they took attendance as a part of the grade. The professors get paid whether you show up or not, so why do they give a shit if someone doesn’t go for an entire semester? If I can get an A without going to class, I think that should be allowed.
TAs Grading Assignments
In a philosophy class last year, I helped one of my friends for an entire exam. She got an A on that. I got a B. We submitted the same responses. Yeah, I know that’s kind of cheating, but my point is that because we had two different TAs, the same answers were graded completely differently. I know some classes have a big number of students, but for fuck’s sake, grading is a part of your job as a professor. Students shouldn’t get boned because they have an idiotic TA.
