Theo Nash
@theo_nash
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Classicist. PhD student IPCAA, MA and BA Victoria University of Wellington. šØš¦š³šæ
Ann Arbor, MI
Joined February 2017
This was a lot of fun to put together: do have a read!
Why do we study Ancient Greece? To expand our shared knowledge of the past or for personal enrichment? Is research a primary or secondary aim? Today, @theo_nash of @UMich revisits 1930s Oxford to see how rival views of scholarship were keenly thrashed out:
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Even as a Linear B scholar Iām not sure that Iād trade it for Dante and Milton.
@AntigoneJournal The study of Homer is indisputably more interesting than the study of Virgil. With Homer, you engage with archaeology, the Bronze Age, Hittitology, Linear B, orality, Alexandrian scholarship, hapax legomena (and their echoes), and the Nachleben. With Virgil, you get poetry.
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To be fair, excusing studentsā absence so that they can go join a protest is dumb no matter what is being protested.
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The author says that the paper shouldn't have received a zero, but can't even bring themself to say that it deserves to pass. He literally has to re-write it in order to defend it:
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The rubric explicitly asks for a 'thoughtful discussion of some element of the article'. The sentence quoted reads in full: 'share your thoughts about how development proceeds in the domain being researched in the article'. This is vapid at best and bad-faith at worst.
An honest liberal professor: āI donāt share Fulneckyās religious views on gender. But this case troubles me precisely because it validatesā¦conservative complaints about higher education.ā āThereās no legitimate justification for this essay receiving zero points.ā
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An in-depth rummage through the academic lives of some early C20 British classicists by @theo_nash. Fascinating stuff.
"Professionalisation has opened the doors but locked the windows: scholarship is no longer a pastime for the wealthy amateur, but the gap between academia and the public grows ever wider." On Classics in interwar Oxford, and on how the wheels have turned: https://t.co/mstH2yvh5p
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How about a course that teaches students not to use AI when it is explicitly banned in the syllabus?
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A lot of people have either not read the whole essay or are deliberately trying to sanewash it.
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Saying that your TA is spreading Satanās demonic lies is, in fact, quite outside the distribution of ānormal student submissionsā.
Progressives lying about this issue (ie. pretending that itās outside the distribution of normal student submissions on a throwaway response assignment) have given the story a much longer life than if they admitted the TA probably made a mistake, as TAs and profs often do.
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Real-world Quellenforschung: identifying which AI system a student used to write their essay.
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Really you just have to get through the whole thing without claiming that your teacher is spreading Satan's demonic lies. Most students do not find this particularly challenging.
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The point isn't that its slop per se, but that it's not remotely about the assigned reading. Reading responses aren't rigorous assignments: they're free points for students who do the challenging work of a) reading the assigned article b) talking about what they read.
The Turning Point studentās essay was slop, but so were the teachersā responses, and itās almost guaranteed that everyone else in that class turned in ideologically-compliant slop of similar low quality and got away with it.
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The university, perhaps unsurprisingly, has chosen to coddle the student (who, after all, pays tuition) and throw the TA (pesky creatures, which must be paid) under the bus.
The freedom to think and say what you want does not extend to getting the grade you want, especially when the essay (reproduced down thread) clearly did not follow the assignment. I might have been nice and given it 5 points (since it was, mirabile dictu, clearly written). But
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It has been very funny watching a certain subset of Twitter pivot from outrage at grade inflation to outrage when bad work got a bad grade.
@theo_nash It does extend to not getting flunked out, though. She did the assignment passably well. 0 out of 25 points is an obvious case of punishing wrongthink. These profs cannot pull this shit at a publicly funded university.
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The freedom to think and say what you want does not extend to getting the grade you want, especially when the essay (reproduced down thread) clearly did not follow the assignment. I might have been nice and given it 5 points (since it was, mirabile dictu, clearly written). But
For a psychology course at the University Oklahoma, Samantha Fulnecky was asked to write a 650-word essay reacting to an article about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. In her essay, Fulnecky argued that traditional gender roles should not be
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Classics survives at the University of Ottawa, though āplanning the changes it will make to the programme in order to attract more studentsā has the feel of an unpleasant euphemism.
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The other half of it is that your grades donāt matter academically, at least for doctoral students. You get jobs based on your dissertation and research, not your GPA.
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