posted
I never actually did this, but there was always a faint whiff of BS about my papers. I was a marginally better writer than my classmates, so about half-past high school I got the idea that maybe I could "sell" these papers on the quality of the writing rather than on the content. Hey, if I was going to be a writer when I grew up...
The thing is, it worked, for the most part. Trouble was, I never felt as if I was working hard enough of this stuff. I had plenty of professors in college who were sufficiently rapacious with the red pen to give me the smackdown no matter how purple my prose, though even those usually had spiffy grades attached. I assume that the professors were just happy to have a writer in the class who they didn't have to beat to death with mechanical trivia.
So I tended to feel cynical and lazy about my professors until I wised up and realized that some of them didn't place the same emphasis on the papers as they placed on, say, the classroom lectures or the final. They all had the same "five five-page papers per semester plus two theses and a project" syllabi, presumably on dictum from management, and some of the professors who didn't put much effort into going through the papers were fire and lightning in front of a class full of enraptured students.
To those brave enough to teach: I can only remember what it was like to have produced all this impenetrable garbage. I can't begin to imagine what it was like to have to read it all.
posted
I am a college prof., and at my former job (diff. college), a fellow English teacher told me his secret--that for the past two years, on the first day of class after drop/add (to be sure that all were there) he said to his students--Here's a deal: none of you have to show up to class again for the semester, and you all get a B or a B+, okay?
He told me that during the semesters of the "agreement" only one student quibbled, and he gave him an A.
quote:Originally posted by Luvox: I am a college prof., and at my former job (diff. college), a fellow English teacher told me his secret--that for the past two years, on the first day of class after drop/add (to be sure that all were there) he said to his students--Here's a deal: none of you have to show up to class again for the semester, and you all get a B or a B+, okay?
He told me that during the semesters of the "agreement" only one student quibbled, and he gave him an A.
True story.
So what is the point of his "working" there at all?
-------------------- "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."--George Bernard Shaw Posts: 19266 | From: Nashville, TN | Registered: Jun 2002
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Luvox
The Red and the Green Stamps
posted
Exactly...I don't know what he's up to now, but if he's still there, he doesn't "Work" there...he uses the office, the computer, the library to work on his own writing....collects a paycheck, gets benefits, and doesn't teach. He does research, goes to dept. meetings, etc. There's a ton of pork in academia, and I'm not talking about the fetal pigs in the bio labs...
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posted
I always wrote my papers from start to end, without any inserts to catch the professor. I'd actually get quite a few comments from my professors, which indicated to me that they'd been read - no grade at the end and noncommittal sentance about overall quality. Genuine paragraph by paragraph commentary, usually in the dreaded red ink.
My entire time at college, I don't think I ever started a paper more than four days before it was due. Researching ahead of time? Pah! That's what losers do. I'd pretty much work out the thesis in my head, give it a rough outline in my head, then skim the books I had to look for cites and quotations to beef it up. That method served me well.
The bullshittingest paper I wrote was a two-page exhibition review - I did a lot of those in College, since I was an art major... you know, three or four a semester - on an exhibition I hadn't attended. I looked up the gallery's website, looked at the images they had from the exhibition, and threw in references to the Shroud of Turin and Pop Art, and a whole slew of arty-babble. Got an A+ with the comment that it was one of the best reviews the prof. had ever read.
I was torn between shame and pride on that one. Posts: 494 | From: Epping, Essex, UK | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Heck, if we're going to dance with pure BS papers...
Freshman year, I had to write a five-page paper on a statue at the art museum. A specific one, but right after he assigned it, the darn thing was taken off display for cleaning. I mentioned it, but the prof didn't care.
So, I BSed. And BSed. And BSed some more. Final result? 39.5/40.
-------------------- "To be or not to be! That is the question! Now, will you answer, dare, double dare, or take the Physical Challenge?" --Mark Summers as Hamlet Countdown: 177 days and counting... or less. My blog. 14 keyboards owed. Posts: 5584 | From: Ohio | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
We had the dreaded "Coach teaches throwaway class" at our highschool too. It was a mandatory (with no honors equivalent) history in our case. A friend pulled the ol' "if you read this I'll give you a pop" thing on him with, of course, no response. Not remarkable coming from a teacher who didn't grade down on stuff printed directly from IE with the url and banner ads still on it.
Of course none of our college professors would have been anything like the OP. But we did wonder about the staircase method sometimes One Prof had a reversed 6th sense for long-effort/ lunch-before-class papers and always graded the ones with the most effort the poorest.
-------------------- Bender: Though you may have to make a metaphorical "deal with the devil". And by "devil", I mean the robot devil, and by "metaphorically" I mean get your coat. ------------ My sad site: A new way to be bored. Posts: 722 | From: Colorado | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
This point is rather moot now that I'm three and a half years out of college, but is there a certain technique to BSing a paper? I likewise procrastinated with many a paper, but I was always up until 5 a.m. or pulling an all-nighter to finish it, because I simply didn't know how to BS. I even did the insert-questionably-relevant-charts and blockquote-so-the-margins-are-smaller-and-you-don't-have-to-paraphrase tricks, and still had a hard time. I always had to rely on good old fashioned read 'n' synthesize to do my papers, because aside from full-out plagiarism, I didn't know how to BS.
-birdman
Posts: 1104 | From: near Cleveland, Ohio | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
Although this sounds like an urban legend, I too have done something similar.
Our teacher always complained about our handwriting in history. On one pop quiz where I was clueless on two questions I made up word after word in script and handed in my test on which I got a 85%- including the two questions being given 100% correct score. That was 8th grade so I'm sure college would be a bit harder to pull it off in.
Posts: 64 | From: Missoula, MT | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I ran across a real world variation of this:
"...a CIA employee made up a story of a terrorist plot to hijack Santa Claus and inserted it into classified traffic. "So, apparently, the fact that [the] CIA had a sense of humor was classified," said subcommittee counsel Lawrence J. Halloran."
-------------------- No man has a right in America to treat any other man "tolerantly" for tolerance is the assumption of superiority. -Wendell L. Willkie Posts: 3833 | From: Virginia | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
"In some sense I was angry that my hard work wasn't even being evaluated. But, I quickly got past that. An A is an A."
Ah, the real lessons of our educational system.
A quasi-related shenanigan: I had a housemate who was a graduate student working as a T.A., and she sub-contracted me to grade her student's papers. I was very amused, since I don't have a college degree myself, and am not all that familiar with the subject. But I did the job, and I would make a seperate pile of papers which I figured, on the quality of the writing, were from ESL students. (The grading was based mostly on argument, not English, so I thought that my housemate would want to forgive the atrocious grammar, spelling, and punctuation.)
As it turned out, none of the papers I had pulled out were by ESL students. They were all by functionally illiterate American English-speakers. But there were a number of ESL students in the class, and I hadn't flagged any of their papers...
Posts: 330 | From: New Haven, VT | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I had a friend in high school who wrote an editorial-style letter to the teacher in the midst of his civics essay. It was something along the lines of, "Dear Mrs. X, Do you really expect us all to do this brainless homework? Really, I think my parents' tax dollars go to waste on this, etc." He actually did do the assignment, before and after the "letter," so it was obviously just to piss her off.
He still got a B- on the paper, along with a response from the teacher explaining that, yes, she did think it was a worthwhile exercise and that he'd better do it.
-------------------- Another lifetime I'd have fallen in love with you Swept away by my feelings, ashamed and confused But just now it's enough to be walking with you Let the mystery play as it will! -Lui Collins Posts: 2669 | From: Jouy en Josas, France | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I'm just trying to recall if I ever wrote a report that wasn't just thrown together off the top of my head, padded with irrelevant digressions, and sprinkled with statistics I'd made up earlier that day.
First "nope, not even that one" of Two
-------------------- "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide." - Jerry Pournelle Posts: 14567 | From: Pennsylvania | Registered: Jan 2002
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quote:Originally posted by First of Boo: I'm just trying to recall if I ever wrote a report that wasn't just thrown together off the top of my head, padded with irrelevant digressions, and sprinkled with statistics I'd made up earlier that day.
And you still do that with your posts here.
Pogue
-------------------- Let's drink to the causes in your life: Your family, your friends, the union, your wife. Posts: 11325 | From: Kentucky | Registered: Nov 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Ben Who: I never actually did this, but there was always a faint whiff of BS about my papers. I was a marginally better writer than my classmates, so about half-past high school I got the idea that maybe I could "sell" these papers on the quality of the writing rather than on the content. Hey, if I was going to be a writer when I grew up...
The thing is, it worked, for the most part. Trouble was, I never felt as if I was working hard enough of this stuff.
I'm definitely guilty of this. My most recent paper, for American Literature, I knew was crap. I had good ideas, but I ran out of steam and my conclusion was weak. But I got an "A" and the comment from the prof that my writing had "verve, sophistication, and imagination." He did mention my conclusion was lacking, but I still feel like I snowballed him with big words, polished structure, and a few clever turns of phrase.
As pleased as I am to get that "A," I don't think I deserved it. There was more BS in my paper than there is at a rodeo. If I were the prof, I'd have given myself a high "C"/low "B."
The most frequent comment I've gotten on papers since high school is that my writing is "sophisticated." It feeds my ego to hear it, and it's made me more confident in my writing to have it praised, but I feel like one day it's all going to come crashing down and all those teachers I've impressed are going to realize what at utter country bumpkin I really am. Or worse, they'll decide I'm a pretentious, pompous ass.
-------------------- Someday I'll aquire wisdom, but for now, being a wise-ass will have to do. Posts: 90 | From: the Michigan/Ohio border | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
A friend of mine has actually beens suspended from university after writing in a term paper "...and we'll use wood for the electric magnet since noone will give a f.@". Although a) the myth is very old and b) there was a story recently when they pulled something similar with some boring textbook.
Posts: 246 | From: Toronto, ON / Kyiv, Ukraine | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I'd give anything to go back and take all those classes, read all those books, even do the reports - without any BS... Maybe that's why I stayed in academia all these years: I'm hoping one day to become the quiet old professor who the young instructors allow to sit in the back, taking notes, just like a part of the classroom furniture.
Posts: 4922 | From: Kyoto, Japan | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I was what is euphemistically called a mature student in performing arts. Now you don't expect a performing arts teacher to be a genius but you expect them to at least know their subject. It didn't take long to realise that her pretentiousness far outweighed her knowlege. My papers became works of modern art, it didn't matter that I said nothing in them as long as the words I said nothing with were long enough. I mastered the art of absolute bilge but because she couldn't understand it she marked it A+ all the way.
-------------------- All the world's a face, And all the men and women merely acne. Posts: 673 | From: Glasgow, Scotland | Registered: Oct 2005
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posted
One of my professors, who eventually became a colleague, was a raging alcoholic. Once I was in a class that had been waited 20 minutes for him to show up (he was notoriously late, so we gave him a little extra time), and he suddenly breezed by the door. He did a double take, stepped back, looked around the room in disbelief, and snarled, "GO HOME!" We all wrote crazy stuff in our papers for him and showed the unmarked passages to each other later. He would catch people cheeting on exams and just roll his eyes.
He was the head of the department, and unfortunately became the advisor for my thesis by default when my real advisor suddenly went on maternity leave. It was hell. He never read a thing I gave him, or offered me any direction or advice. I saw him on the news a few times, being hailed as a genius, and all I could think was, "You are the reason I don't believe in tenure."
-------------------- The technical term is narcissism. You can't believe everything is your fault unless you also believe you're all powerful.--House Posts: 2684 | From: Budapest | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Little Pink Pill, your prof sounds very much like a nationally-acclaimed poet who was a professor on the faculty of a major state university. A friend of mine had him as his major professor on his doctorate. My friend was so nervous about his defense of his dissertation--because the alcoholic poet had been of no help while he was working on his dissertation--that he asked me to drive him to the campus on that day.
The defense began, and I hung around the departmental office chatting with a teacher with whom I had gone to school. Half an hour or so into the defense, the poet breezed in to check his mail. I jumped up and asked, "Is the defense of the dissertation over?"
The poet just looked at me and said, "Who's defending a dissertation today?"
I told him my friend's name and stammered, "and you're his major professor."
The poet waved his hand and said, "Oh, don't worry about George. He'll do fine." Then he breezed out again.
My friend's name is Gary.
And he said that after the major professor didn't bother to show up, the other professors on his review committee grilled him. It took four hours when all was said and done.
Brad "but he got his Ph.D." from Georgia
-------------------- "No hard feelin's and HOPpy New Year!"--Walt Kelly Hear what you're missing: ARTC podcasts! http://artcpodcast.org/ Posts: 7581 | From: Gainesville, Georgia | Registered: Jun 2000
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Richard W
Ding Dong! Merrily on High Definition TV
posted
I had a tutor a bit like that for my dissertation. He... seemed to be having various personal troubles that I couldn't quite work out.
Either way it was very difficult to arrange meetings with him, and I needed meetings (apart from the fact that they were supposedly a requirement). My dissertation was based on a pet method of his to solve differential equations. I wasn't getting results that looked right to me; I had tried lots of different things that hadn't helped, and wanted some guidance as to what I was doing wrong. He was never in, and ignored notes and email. He was very late for some of the meetings that I did manage to arrange on the grounds that he was hung over. (I thought that was meant to be the student's excuse!) Whenever I tried to show him my procedures and results - which were on rough line-feed printer paper as they were working results - he said "You can't hand them in for your dissertation printed like that" (to which the answer was "I'm not going to. I just want you to look at what I'm doing and see if you can see anything wrong..."), then refused to comment on them further, and if I was lucky went over some of the bookwork again. He wasn't any help at all in identifying problems because he just wouldn't look at what I was doing.
I got some sensible-ish results but fewer than half of them were any good. I wrote up the dissertation as best I could (almost two weeks' worth of all-nighters because I'd just started a new job two weeks before the end of the course, thanks to an utter git of an employment agency bloke who'd lied about when the company wanted me to start and made me feel guilty for not dropping my course as soon as they made an offer so he could get his commission earlier). The conclusion was that there must have been a bug somewhere in what I was doing because most of the results weren't sensible - I didn't like to say that there was a possibility that my tutor's pet method didn't work - but I hadn't been able to find it despite trying numerous variations on the code, and these results were the best I could get.
So I went back for the review meeting with my tutor and another assessor, ran the program, showed them the equations I'd been trying to solve and the dodgy results (all of which I'd been trying to show my tutor for the last two months) and he said "Well I wouldn't expect sensible results from that equation. It's xxxx-form and my procedure is only meant to solve yyyy-form equations." (I can't remember what the different forms of equations were. The differences were pretty technical though.) This hadn't been given in any of the papers I'd read, and it was the first time he'd mentioned that his method was limited in this way. It was the first time he'd paid any attention at all to what I was doing.
I controlled my temper and said "Well that explains why it's not working then" and showed the rest of the results, some of which were apparently solving the correct sort of equation because they were more sensible. At the end he sighed and said, very dismissively, something like "Well I wouldn't worry too much about it; it's obvious you haven't a clue what you were doing". I really had to bite my tongue.
Apparently he set this assignment - which, again, was supposedly to test his own pet theory so you'd have thought he'd have been at least slightly interested - every year and nobody had managed to do it well enough for him.
Anyway, the other assessor was clearly not taken in because I got a distinction for the dissertation in the end, but it really pissed me off.
Posts: 8725 | From: Ipswich - the UK's 9th Best Place to Sleep! | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
I've done the same in high school with a teacher I knew just glanced at the length of essays, but never with foul language and never in college. All I did was get really sarcastic and/or go off on absurd tangents, so that anyone who actually read it would comment.
The worst I've done in college was in Spanish III. I was taking it in summer as the last requirement I needed to fulfill before graduation. I didn't want to take it and I've always been awful with languages, so there was no question of me ever retaining it. I even had had a job lined up for over 6 months prior and was due to start it two weeks after the class ended, so I had a bad case of Senioritis. So I started using Babelfish for homework, and with a little checking for obvious errors it worked. I scraped by with a C, though I think the teacher was being generous.
Posts: 2018 | From: Santa Barbara, California | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
A friend of a friend (I know, but this is reliable) in high school was answering a question on her homework one time, wrote the word "fuck" in the middle of her sentence, finished the sentence and got an A.
Posts: 86 | From: Georgia | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
When I was in fifth grade the whole class had to write essays to the principal apologizing for how badly we'd behaved to a substitute. I thought that was wrong because I hadn't done anything bad. So I wrote an essay about how stupid the assignment was and I wrote that if the principal thought that I should be punished for something the others did then her "head must be full of garbage."
Well, she read them alright because the next day I got a long talk in the hallway. My teachers were shocked because I'd always been good. I hated when kids were treated unfairly and that wasn't the last run-in I had with that principal. (She looked and acted just like Jackie Brown. Even when she suspended me for a different non-infraction, she was still so cool about it that I had to admire her.)
Posts: 4922 | From: Kyoto, Japan | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Actually, I tried something like this once out of curiosity and slipped a "Merry Christmas by the way" into a text. Too much of a coward for anything else
Anyway, I got a "thanks, same to you", which gave me all the information I wanted.
This paper scored maximum points by the way, but it would probably have done anyway - and most probably I wouldn't have dared such a thing, too, if I weren't sure that the rest was at least good to start with.
Ulko "oh, by the way, my thesis prof does things like that too" maalainen
-------------------- Movie characters never make typing mistakes. Posts: 586 | From: Hamburg, Germany | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
My sister once had to design a set of webpages on Romanticism for an AP European History course. On one of the pages, she put a message at the bottom: "If you read this, tell me and you'll get a cookie."
Sadly, the teacher did not get a cookie.
In one of my classes last semester, I got rather punchy while writing one of my papers (probably out of exhausion), and started sounding a little abrupt with everything. My professor returned it with an A and the note, "Pithy, but you got the point across well."
-------------------- "But about the reindeer...what kind of a nose shines? How did he get it? Maybe it's not a reindeer after all. It could be something else." Posts: 2216 | From: Winston-Salem, NC | Registered: Nov 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Luvox: I am a college prof., and at my former job (diff. college), a fellow English teacher told me his secret--that for the past two years, on the first day of class after drop/add (to be sure that all were there) he said to his students--Here's a deal: none of you have to show up to class again for the semester, and you all get a B or a B+, okay?
He told me that during the semesters of the "agreement" only one student quibbled, and he gave him an A.
True story.
That would've ticked me off as a student. It's college, you have to PAY for those classes. Anyway, I never snuck any messages into my papers. I am guilty of repeating myself, rephrased of course, to get a paper up to the acceptable length.
-------------------- Too broke to pay attention Posts: 452 | From: Omaha, NE | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Anyte: [QUOTE]...It's college, you have to PAY for those classes....
I used to tell my students that on the first day of class: Someone is paying a lot for this so you might want to get something out of it besides a grade the credits. They looked at me as if I'd just gone completely nuts.
Posts: 4922 | From: Kyoto, Japan | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I've been a teacher for *AHEM* more than a few years, and I can tell you with absolute, "I've seen it with my own eyes" certainty that there ARE in fact teachers and professors out there who grade essays and term papers on neatness and length alone. They never read a single word of them. I know a High School English teacher who grades the first paper he assigns his students faithfully, then simply gives every paper that student turns in after that the same grade because, as he says, "no one ever improves." He didn't seem to think there was anything WRONG with the fact that no student of his ever improved...
-------------------- "I will tell you in another life, when we are both cats." Posts: 308 | From: Cleveland | Registered: Aug 2005
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I didn't think to swear at it, but the last question on my introductory microeconomics midterm asked us to explain the difference between Expected Utility Theory and Prospect Theory (not covered in the course up to that point, naturally). I tried to guess what Prospect Theory was based on the name, and BSed an elaborate example contrasting it with EUT. I concluded, "Alternatively, Expected Utility Theory differs from Prospect Theory in that I understand Expected Utility Theory and have never heard of Prospect Theory."
I got full credit--half credit, I was told, for getting lucky and devising a partial outline of Prospect Theory, and half credit for having a sense of humor.
Posts: 1640 | From: New Haven, CT | Registered: Dec 2002
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posted
I never did this in a paper, but I was a writing tutor, and getting caught would've gotten me in big trouble with the writing center admin.
I did, however, once answer a question on a history final with "I have no idea. My mind is a complete and total blank at this point. Any chance of partial credit for honesty and not wasting your time with an entire page of made-up rambling?" I got a smiley and 1/10 credit. Result!
Blushing "Yes, I did read other students' papers where they had tried this" Bride
-------------------- "In perfume, as in underwear, the scantiest of applications provides the greatest of returns." -Silas Sparkhammer Posts: 858 | From: Arlington, Texas | Registered: Aug 2005
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In High school ESL : LA, I had to write a paper interpreting... Ah, I don't know, the meaning of a song. I did three page, referenced mythology, King Arthur, courage, some philosopher... Four pages. 82%.
The song I'd picked? Pokémon : The Theme Song.
Yeah, I BSed my way out of High School and my first DEC coursework (Didn't get the DEC, because... I don't know, some teacher actually wanted me to work. I still ressent him.)
Once you'd figured the attendance-taking scheme of a teacher, you just went down to the cafeteria and watched movies on someone's laptop.
Yeah, my grades were ABYSMAL. But I still skated by. Human Science makes for easy BS. (When in doubt, quote Marx or Freud. Repeat as needed.)
Only twice have I felt that teachers didn't read papers : Labs reports this year... My team keeps getting the same (Perfect!) grade over and over, even after my partner did a lab while partially drunk and wrote the report (For a lab she didn't remember, mind you) hours before the class.
The other... Well, we had this teacher who'd write down the time you handed the exam in on the cover sheet. I have a feeling it was related to grading.
Case in point : I walked out of a 3 hour final after 27 minutes. Got 92%. People who had the same answers (They copied off each others) got different grades.
Eti"I wanna be the very best"enne
Posts: 1102 | From: Quebec | Registered: Dec 2001
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