While looking for an article I skimmed over in the local university daily about how to skip classes without being busted, I found this, the Skipclass Calculator.
Ingenious? Stupid? Offensive? (Probably all three, and more!) In an alternate universe, there'd be a calculator that advised students on a variety of cunning strategies for learning. But no, we don't live in that universe. We live...HERE...
That really points out to me that there are a lot of students in college that really don't belong there. If I made that calculator, I might ask: How much tuition do you pay? How many credit hours do you take? How many hours is this class? And tell them how much money they are wasting by not showing up.
ReplyDeleteI ran it from the POV of someone who's missed my class twice and the answer was "Are you crazy? You need to go to class! In fact, you need to go to office hours and start sucking up!"
ReplyDeleteMwaha.
Damn. Looks like I have to go teach tommorow since I've already missed 2% of the classes and my next big thing is 29 days away.
ReplyDeleteI threw some numbers in and got, "Not only is your mother going to be mad if you skip this class, but your prof might actually enjoy flunking you!"
ReplyDeleteI think I like the thing.
No Cookies for Filbert, puhleeze: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=71157.0
ReplyDeleteWe have a major parking crunch on campus (and they changed the drop date to match the add date -- no eagerly anticipating class sizes to all shrink in the next few weeks), so this could be useful -- keep some students off campus (and maybe some faculty) so I don't need to arrive 6 hours before my first class?
ReplyDeleteI just realized that the site does not require the students to perform any calculations. The website does it for them. They do, however, have to remember some basic facts about the class. That should be hard enough for most of them.
ReplyDelete