Re:Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
by whatshisface on Sunday January 13, 2019 @08:18PM
(#18899859)
>If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.
You could have a course that was neither rigorous nor ideologically biased, in fact every department could have them. I dream of an alternate universe (which one day could be ours) where instead of "You get an A but you have to pretend to agree with the professor 101," we could have, "the X department runs through their favorite material, but skips all of the really tedious parts that you would have to learn if you wanted to contribute, but as a spectator could go without."
Re:Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
by analog31 on Sunday January 13, 2019 @08:51PM
(#18900016)
A lot of colleges have an option to "audit" a course. My own experience was that in spectator mode, I didn't really learn anything, because courses had a "learn by doing" aspect that was pretty valuable for me. Also, courses I was taking for a grade always got priority for study time.
Re:Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
by aaronblohowiak on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:57AM
(#18901177)
At Drexel, they had “physics for designers”, which is roughly what you describe.
We may have rolled our eyes, but in reality we were in on the game and had a vested interest in it, because the fluff courses were known to be an easy A. For one thing, a course that everybody in the college had to take, everybody had to pass. For another, teachers with a strong ideological agenda tended to be easy graders, because they wanted to be liked. So we sucked it up in those courses and were thankful for the boost to our GPA's.
If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.