Yes, I love having my zoology class completely interrupted and derailed to do an assignment on something completely unrelated to the class, it's very smart forcing this bullshit into classes that it doesn't make sense for instead of making it an elective for people who need it.
I love being groomed to prove my worth to capital by researching and compiling a list of skills based on the random whims of the employer class. I love being forced to read and reference very totally academic and serious reports like "The New Work Order Series" that present findings like "Young Australians are currently working more jobs than ever before but they're also underemployed despite being more skilled than ever before." and then they somehow make the dumbass conclusion that "Our young people are not prepared for work." Oh yes, it's always the fault of us workers, isn't it? It couldn't be the fault of employers not doing their part. Nope. I'm sure that reading a bunch of LinkedIn profiles and writing an assignment up proving that I understand what employers want will make their demands less unreasonable. I love that I'm essentially paying employers to propagandize at me. I love that this complete joke of an assessment, written by some HR goon, gets to push its way, unearned, into the same realm as a field of science that has undergone centuries of rigorous peer review.
This shit, which has nothing to do with Zoology, is worth 10% of my mark for Zoology. I had to do a similar one halfway through Chemistry.
Fuckng bullshit propaganda I am going to screm
Requesting a c/rant because AAAAAAAA
Bit idea:
Twist every one of these bullshit assignments into opportunities to lampoon the assignments themselves
For example: "The encroachment of HR and business school orthodoxy into unrelated academic studies and the compulsory assignments which are entirely irrelevant to the study of fields of science, such as zoology, may be in part a cause for why 'our young people are not prepared for work', as the article discusses.
Given that there is a limited amount of time dedicated to achieving a tertiary qualification, there is a zero-sum situation where the more time that a degree in zoology is dedicated to this business school orthodoxy, the less time is dedicated to the study of sciences such as zoology, meaning that compulsory assignments such as these may, paradoxically, be a causative factor for the lack of preparedness of younger generations of university graduates as they will be less prepared for employment in their relevant fields than prior generations whose degrees were dedicated wholly to the study of their field of choice and thus their profession."
Or, whatever. Something to that effect but more polished and with references added. You get the gist though.
Just dunk on the assignments within the assignments themselves mercilessly. If your tutors or lecturers are the ones who are marking these papers then they'll almost certainly be sympathetic towards the arguments you make. If it's some business school dipshit who's marking it then you'll probably lose a few marks but you could likely appeal it and at the end of the day 10% of fuck all is fuck all. If it's what preserves your sanity and gets you through your degree then nobody is gonna fault you for doing it.
Extra points for referencing stuff like Gramscian hegemony or, idk, Mark Fisher or David Graeber or similar while you're writing these essays.
we do need a c/rant. also fucking zoology? of all the classes.
Seconded, although I will probably accidentally create a new copypasta because hot damn do I have some things to say about the state of even finding a job.
fuck yes dude i love replacing education with job training i love living in the best of all possible worlds
Death to America
c/rant would have been great for my war on Amazon firesticks.
Have a friend teaching composition in uni and she's also forced to give the kids assignments where they assess their skills as it relates to their desired career path and the official university position is that "AI augmented writing is encouraged."
Yeah my fuckin high-school in the mid/late 2000's had a graduation requirement that you log like 40 "work or volunteer" hours or some shit.
That’s miserable. My uni just made us take comms nonsense to learn how to write like email job drones.
They aren’t even pretending anymore it sounds like.
That's all I remember from my professional writing course I needed for my Bachelor's. How to write the most sterile email I'll ever read.
Would it be cool to cheese these with LLMs as much as possible? It's clearly meaningless busywork anyway which is the (only) thing LLMs are proven to be good for.
My Uni has made it very clear that LLMs are cheating and we will be expelled if we use them, "We will find out". I'm not sure how they would prove it though.
That sucks comrade. I'd still try to find a way to put minimum effort into it, maybe write some templates ahead of time with a bunch of HR jargon?
To be fair that's exactly what the job market is like though. Use ChatGPT to do your work, fuck it.
I always hated dystopian shit like this when I was in school, before I even had the words for what it was.
Be me porky
Go to restaurant
Waiter comes, hands me a menu and also lists off specials
Refuse everything
Despite being a grown-ass man shout that they should know I'm a very picky eater and that is their problem, not mine.
No one knows what to do with me and give up on trying to serve me and the owner kicks me out
Why does no one at the restaurant want to feed me? They must be too incompetent to prepare any meals.
Saw it with my partner having to do "positive thinking" lessons and other stuff that can losely be compared to religious practices like confession and prayer, like needing to write on how you are using shit that could be lifted from The Secret to take responsibility™ and become a creator™
