Ditto. Can any subject require more subservience to a teacher than the 'Kantian interpretive' type he uses here?

Once I completed an essay assignment for a college Shakespeare class, filling in everything I knew the teacher wanted me to say. At the end however, I wrote something like "However, I don't actually believe what I wrote above."

When I got the marked essay back, there were lots of positive comments in the margins, until the last paragraph. There the comment was, "Jim, I think we should discuss this."

I got an A in that class.

The author, apparently, does not have a good understanding of Kant.

The potentially scary question for me is: how many kids who get As on their Kant papers think they really understand Kant because of it? The kids I hung out with all acknowledged that they were just bullshitting to get the grade, but I don't know if most kids would admit that even to themselves.

An even scarier thought: Not everyone bullshits to get the grade. Some people actually care.

Actually, though, this has some truth to it. Not only that, but the truth of the statement is directly proportional to the quality of the institution the student attends (or at least the German philosophy department of said institution)

I wrote two papers on Kant in uni, neither of which received an A.

My take is that intelligence follows a distribution curve for which graders at any decent college are only able to effectively evaluate the upper quartile, minus the top 1 or 2 percent. If you happen to be pushing the top 1 or 2 percent, you either have to lower yourself to the level of your graders or write your best thoughts and expect to receive less than the best grades for them.

If you follow the first track, you can expect the usual laurels for 'achievement.' If you follow the second, you can expect to increase your intelligence at a higher rate, which may (or may not) have some payback later on.

There's a fairly good chance that even Kant didn't understand Kant.

Whether you think you can, or think you're Kant, you're right.