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Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
(nymag.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Very easy to tell if someone knows what they wrote about in a two minute conversation. My wife grades/t.a's at a university, it's obvious when someone doesn't know the information in person (and she's very understanding towards people who cannot verbalize the information but still know it). The old professors aren't very keen to it, but the graders can very easily smell the bullshit.
And if you know the information well enough, but send it through gpt for editing/refinement, that's usually accepted, unless you're in a class that grades on composition.
That may work in senior courses, but a freshman class with hundreds of students needs standardized tests.
I don't know how you extrapolate "no emphasis on learning" from "large classes". The classes are large because they can afford to be large. They teach introductory courses, and their goal is to even out the baseline before the students go into sophomore courses. Freshmen come from many different education systems - private vs public, local vs out of state/province/country, fresh out of school vs returning to education after working, etc. This is also why these courses can be graded with standardized testing, because they set the standard themselves.
Not to mention that the "more and better teachers" mantra should be applied all the way down to primary education.
Unfortunately our societies prioritise these things differently.
I believe you're 100% right. I didn't attend many, probably most, of my lectures as they're completely useless for me - I simply don't learn well from listening and frantically taking notes. It was much faster and more effective to read the material and interact with it in some way, usually rewording and condensing it into a study guide. The few classes I did attend either had mandatory attendance, so I just ignored the lecture and did my own thing during that time, or the class was significantly interactive so I actually learned from it.
When I did my undergrad the core modules had upwards of 400 people in them, never had a single multiple choice test in my entire degree. Thats a choice not a neccessity.