• VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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    13 天前

    These types constantly whine about having to take “pointless” academic writing courses and then go on to prove why they desperately need them. This horseshit would’ve been struggling to get a C in high school.

    650 words

    I’ll admit it’s been a hot minute since I was in college/uni, and I was a Lit major, but 650 words isn’t an essay, at most it’s some type of reflection assignment. Even in high school I never had an essay assignment with that few words.

    In college? I was writing 2000-3000 word essays or short stories minimum for 4 different classes with at least one due for any given week. Plus, at least a novel’s worth of reading for each week. Midterms would usually be another essay written in-class. If the final was a take home essay or project it was often in the range of 10-15 pages single-spaced.

    650 words is literally fucking nothing and it’s no surprise that TPUSA losers somehow manage to fail it. This is middle school level work.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      13 天前

      exactly, this is such a short assignment that its consequence can’t be more than an afterthought and now it’s…this. it’s just such a fucking pathetic failure on the part of the student, the hitler youth (tpusa-ou), and the university itself by cowing to this utter drivel. i was a dreaded STEM major in college, and i took a bunch of courses that required significantly more writing on a regular basis.

      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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        13 天前

        Chuds display such an active hatred of learning that I can only conclude that the only reason any of them bother going to college is to manufacture right wing outrage in an attempt to become a grifter

        • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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          13 天前

          don’t forget the veneer of conferred merit that all of these fascist institutions generally consider a positive, regardless of their prevaricating on the woke indoctrination of the university.

        • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          13 天前

          I’ve written assignments longer than this for art classes. Literally just talking about pictures and sculpture for more than 600 words. We’d go to local galleries and have to type up responses to what we saw. Or giving feedback on classmates’ work, which needed to be written down so they could reference it later.

      • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        13 天前

        Oh man. I had a capstone enviro science unit that gave us a major assignment with a ~600 word limit. That did not make it easier. But we were expected to get a lot done with those 600 words, it was a hard limit, and the professor was well known to be a hard marker.

        But yeah, this is a joke. I would guess it’s a first year unit that’s easing the students into things and maybe was the first assignment for the unit? Not a bad thing, but also not challenging at all.

    • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      13 天前

      I mean, there’s 650 word assignments and 650 word assignments. This one sounds like a joke but I’ve had assignments in science units that were around 600 words that needed to be fully referenced and to both adequately describe and comment on a complex topic, where the word count was explicitly set very, very low for the amount of evidence we were expected to provide, by a practitioner who was frankly very proud of the high level of difficulty of the unit, which was a capstone environmental science unit. He was constantly talking about how many people had to repeat the unit, “because they didn’t actually complete the assignment”, because it’s honestly hard to know if you’ve gotten enough done to answer the prompt in so few words! I did pretty well in the unit overall - one of my weakest but still I believe I got a distinction - and I was sweating bullets worrying about whether or not I had adequately responded to the assignment question. Those assignments weren’t especially time consuming perhaps but they were difficult.

      I’ll also say, I don’t know if you’ve had to write a (scientific) lit review or other assignment for a science unit where you’re providing 3-4 references per paragraph, which you should understand and paraphrase to support whatever you’re trying to say, but bumping out the 2,000 words was always by far the easiest part of that process - a week and a half of reading journal articles and taking notes followed by a few hours of typing.

      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netM
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        13 天前

        I’ve never written a college-level essay for a STEM class. I would probably have failed any non-intro level STEM class.

        But speaking from a humanities perpspective, when you got a 650 word assignment it was almost always because the prof/TAs were handing out freebies to lighten their own workloads. As in, only way you fail them is by not turning anything in. Or at least that’s what I thought until now.

        Definitely in a lit class, there is no way you are ever going to be submitting a 650 word essay. The only time I’ve had to do references packed that dense was in a Chinese history class and that was mostly because the prof had a hard-on for his own books.

        If you did that in a lit class you it would actually drastically increase your chances of failing. It was viewed as just remixing other peoples’ work instead of writing anything of your own. The only exceptions were a class I took on translating literature, and classes on writing theory. And even then, 3-4 references per paragraph would be viewed as excessive.

        • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          13 天前

          Yeah, that makes sense. In science at least, you aren’t doing anything new in undergrad. Anything you say has to come straight out of someone else’s work, because you aren’t actually doing any! If I, as an undergrad, say something about genetics that I haven’t gotten from someone else’s paper, what reason do I have for thinking it’s true? I haven’t done any genetics research so it’s effectively a guess. You are still expected to apply the knowledge you get from your sources to the topic at hand, but you just aren’t in a position to say anything too novel. It’s one of the reasons I suspect STEM degrees are probably on average easier than arts degrees tbh.

          • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            13 天前

            you aren’t doing anything new in undergrad.

            That can be said about every undergraduate degree tbh lol…it’s a matter of demonstrating you learned the material. Humanities professors have already read your essays before you wrote them a decade ago.

            Part of it is training you to do actual research that will be new once you go into grad school or become a professional in your field. You can’t go from writing 1,000 word essays to writing a 75,000 word thesis overnight.

    • alexei_1917 [mirror/your pronouns]@hexbear.net
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      13 天前

      After the revolution, a lot of people are going to need all their slop targeted at low attention spans taken away. See if we can get them to actually read stuff when it’s that or stare at a blank wall.

    • Übercomplicated@lemmy.ml
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      12 天前

      I had philosophy exams in highschool where I had to write upwards of 2000 words in under 2 hours lol. 650 is like a long lemmy comment.