End-of-semester tips
Posted on May 7, 2005 @ 8:24 am
What you say to your professor: “What do I need to make on the final exam to keep a B for the course?”
What your professor hears: “What is the bare minimum amount of work I can put into studying for your stupid exam?”
Oh, and we’re also well aware that using Arial or Courier New instead of Times New Roman artificially inflates the length of your written assignments, so you can cut that out while you’re at it.
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Tales from the Classroom |
6 comments so far...
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Hell yeah. I’m Arial all the way. Except when I had Dr. Graham. He tells you specifically which font to use, how the margins and spacing should be, etc. He’s such a bitch sometimes.
Aaaah! The BS font size thing. I specify font type in the syllabus and tell them that if they think they can fool me by changing font size/margins, they’re insulting my intelligence. Because they all submit an electronic copy of their work as well, if I’m suspicious I simply download and reformat it, then grade the (1/2 shorter) version.
Works like a charm.
Arial? Bah, amateurs!
Real men use Verdana!
I’m always specific on margin size, too. I’ve had papers turned into me before that looked like skinny concrete poetry. Triple-spaced.
haha I remember those tricks. I always felt it was intellectually dishonest. I mean, college is all about learning how to BS, right?
I had a teacher who was so bad, so boring, and so difficult to look at and listen to that I did the bare minimum… I almost dropped out of the class it was so bad (and I liked school). I turned in a 14pt font, 2.5 spaced paper with lots of personal comments like, “You’re probably asking yourself…” Not college worthy work to say the least. He gave me a C+. I would have taken anything short of failing. However, every other class I took I applied myself because the teacher didn’t talk about canibalism most of the time. I think the few students who showed up for the class might have considered eating the teacher if it meant that the semester would have been truncated.