Consciousness is the next expletive.
Usually, when you have done a certain amount of work for a course and attended 100% of lectures and tutorials, you'd expect to have enough material to at least write a passable answer to at least two exam questions.
Unfortunately, my 100% attendance has provided me with practically nil material for my exams. Why?
i) My lecturers digress so much we don't cover the important stuff. I reckon about half my lectures and almost all of my tutorials covered topics that are not going to appear on the exam. This should be a criminal offence in an educational institution.
ii) My lecturer does not even know what the important stuff is. At no point during the course did she explain what the aims of the course were and what were the essential questions we were attempting to answer. As a result, I could not go looking for material related to the essential stuff, cos I didn't know what it was. So most of my own reading is also irrelevant.
iii) My lecturer cannot structure a class or a course for toffee. Issues surrounding a crucial problem will be interspersed throughout the course and their relation to the problem will at no point be stated or even implied. In fact, the key problems and the possible solutions to them are all presented in exactly the same way, just as anecdotal facts surrounding consciousness. This damn woman has obviously never heard of an argument.
As a result, just two weeks before the actual exam, I am having to go and discover what are the key issues of Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness? I have discovered that Qualia, something we did cover in reasonable quantities, is a major feature - but we weren't told that in class. No, Chalmers was on the reading list, and is on the past exam paper, but wasn't in the lectures. Or in the tutorials.
In our recent revision class, we went through reductionism - and it arose that many of the apparently anecdotal examples we went through in class were actually related to this topic. Again, it would have been nice if she could've told us that at the time.
So I'm smart, but even I can't do well in a course where I don't know the bloody issues I'm dealing with. Again, this is not about the possibility of failure, this is about me getting a top grade, but it's bloody frustrating that factors utterly beyond my control are getting in my way.
Unfortunately, my 100% attendance has provided me with practically nil material for my exams. Why?
i) My lecturers digress so much we don't cover the important stuff. I reckon about half my lectures and almost all of my tutorials covered topics that are not going to appear on the exam. This should be a criminal offence in an educational institution.
ii) My lecturer does not even know what the important stuff is. At no point during the course did she explain what the aims of the course were and what were the essential questions we were attempting to answer. As a result, I could not go looking for material related to the essential stuff, cos I didn't know what it was. So most of my own reading is also irrelevant.
iii) My lecturer cannot structure a class or a course for toffee. Issues surrounding a crucial problem will be interspersed throughout the course and their relation to the problem will at no point be stated or even implied. In fact, the key problems and the possible solutions to them are all presented in exactly the same way, just as anecdotal facts surrounding consciousness. This damn woman has obviously never heard of an argument.
As a result, just two weeks before the actual exam, I am having to go and discover what are the key issues of Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness? I have discovered that Qualia, something we did cover in reasonable quantities, is a major feature - but we weren't told that in class. No, Chalmers was on the reading list, and is on the past exam paper, but wasn't in the lectures. Or in the tutorials.
In our recent revision class, we went through reductionism - and it arose that many of the apparently anecdotal examples we went through in class were actually related to this topic. Again, it would have been nice if she could've told us that at the time.
So I'm smart, but even I can't do well in a course where I don't know the bloody issues I'm dealing with. Again, this is not about the possibility of failure, this is about me getting a top grade, but it's bloody frustrating that factors utterly beyond my control are getting in my way.