Grading Hell: Death to the Teachers!!!

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Agathon




The point of the argument was that you are responsible when it comes to choosing the lesser of two evils - even if this choice is forced on you by another. That's called common sense. If the choices of someone else cause you to have to make a decision between ten deaths and one, you are culpable if you don't choose one (not solely culpable, but culpable nonetheless).

Consider a field medic who has the decision of whether to save two lives or one. He is not responsible for shooting any of the three, yet he is clearly delinquent in his duty if he saves only the one. On your view it's OK if he does nothing and all three die - which just shows that Libertarians don't care about human life, because they don't care about minimizing loss of life.

Get that through your head.

Reality is not as simple as your construct. If the person I choose to save is a physician, for example, he may save more lives than the 10 that I chose not to save.

EDIT: fixed the words that moved around in the sentence (by themselves).

[David Floyd]

Contrived? That sort of example happens all the time.

But it misses the point. Of course those in medical fields are expected to make those decisions - that's what they signed up for. They agreed to voluntarily take responsibility for treating the greatest possible number of patients - it's called triage.

That example has nothing to do with the example presented - essentially, someone tells me to either kill one person at random or they will kill ten people. Can you perhaps see the difference?

Go read the old thread. I'm not wasting another 300 posts in the futile cause of persuading you of the obvious.

"The obvious"? Well, in your opinion, "the obvious" is that a murderer can transfer a portion of his responsibility to me, simply by trying to require me to kill someone. That's ridiculous.

[The Mad Viking]

Aggy

Usually, students from o/s a department will, like Asher, lack context, knowledge, and skills required to perform at an acceptable level. They may also, like Asher, fail to value the course they are taking that seems to them to be outside their sphere of interest.

Lack of performance is more often indicative of lack of interest than lack of ability.

That said, I'm sure it is very frustrating dealing with it.

Why do people become teachers? For many, it is a calling. For many, it is a landing space they fall into.

I have a question for you. How does learning for the sake of learning relate to the practice of giving marks? What function do letter grades have? Other than a short term carrot & stick, that is...

I have recently begun to think that we should be evaluating education two years after the teaching of a given curriculum. Who cares what you managed to cram into your short term memory? What did you take away to help you for the rest of your life?

I'm not suggesting that we don't monitor and give feedback on work on an timely basis. But I am quite confident that marks are an extremely crude, wholly inaccurate indicator of education and of ability.

[Starchild]

Asher, my dear boy, Newton was an alchemist and justifiably as much a philosopher as a scientist. Besides, scientists are just a branch of philosophy that managed to get its own tree. We're empiricists and sceptics in the same tradition as Aristotle and Hume. Besides, didn't you ever stop to consider why the ultimate qualification for a scientist is their Ph.D., ie, their Doctorate of Philosophy?

Besides, there's no such thing as "absolute truth" and any decent scientist worth is salt would acknowledge that. "The Truth" is really only the explanation that best fits the majority of the evidence. Hell, Newtonian-Einsteinian physics could be thrown out the window tomorrow if a better explanation came along. Since we're human, we assume that gravity will work across all of Earth but we can never discount the chance that it may not. 99.999999999% likelihood != 100% likelihood.

Computer scientists. Bah. Glorified scriptkiddies with a maths fetish.

[The Mad Viking]

Computer scientists. Bah. Glorified scriptkiddies with a maths fetish.

[Imran Siddiqui]

The only thing truly useful that is "taught" by philosophy is logic.

Anyone else find it funny that the biggest Microsoft backer thinks "ethics" isn't useful .

Anyway, you grade philosophy because in university you grade everything. It's so you aren't just slacking off and actually applying yourself. It leads to future employers realizing you can actually read something and process it, which is a good thing.

Asher has shown he can't understand simple words like the Utilitarianism definition, which EVERYONE else got!

DF, you got spanked in that discussion.

Besides, didn't you ever stop to consider why the ultimate qualification for a scientist is their Ph.D., ie, their Doctorate of Philosophy?

Game. Set. Match.

Aggie thanks you StarChild .

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by Starchild
Besides, there's no such thing as "absolute truth" and any decent scientist worth is salt would acknowledge that.

Very true

[Asher]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Anyone else find it funny that the biggest Microsoft backer thinks "ethics" isn't useful .

Nobody said ethics isn't useful. I did say having some pretentious academic lecture people on ethics is not useful in any way. It's pushing an agenda and opinion he has, nothing more.

Using your logic from above, without philosophers teaching in Universities we would have no ethics...

Perhaps you should take some remedial philosophy courses, I was apparently too quick to give people credit for such basic things.

Asher has shown he can't understand simple words like the Utilitarianism definition, which EVERYONE else got!

DF, you got spanked in that discussion.

Agathon's the one that confused utilitarianism with Utilitarianism, and then he provided a excessively wordy and no doubt precise definition to the philosophical word usage, when it was used (quite obvious) in the colloquial sense. I can understand it fine, but behind each of those words he used like "consequentialism" or whatever, is no doubt another excessively long-winded philosophical definition.

In the end, I'd maintain that only someone who studies philosophy would know exactly what he meant by the definition. Because, as we all know, philosophy is all about the semantics.

Besides, didn't you ever stop to consider why the ultimate qualification for a scientist is their Ph.D., ie, their Doctorate of Philosophy?

Game. Set. Match.

Nonsense, I've said this about a hundred times now but for some reason it's hard to sink in for the philosophy types -- the argument isn't past uses of philosophy (including the origin of "PhD"). It's a bit tired how people keep referring to Philosophy back when it was a giant umbrella for anything related to knowledge, and somehow apply that to the trivial crap Philosophers deal with today because all of the truly useful aspects of "knowledge" have since branched out into specialized fields.

[Rogan Josh]

Well, to be frank, the discussions we have about 'science' on 'poly are not really science - they are philosophy. I don't see anything wrong with philosophy, as long as you know its place.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Well, to be frank, the discussions we have about 'science' on 'poly are not really science - they are philosophy. I don't see anything wrong with philosophy, as long as you know its place.

Huh?
So compsci threads are philosophy threads?

Is this another trick where we apply Philosophy to mean knowledge?

[Agathon]

Whupped, Asher.

Utilitarianism and utilitarianism really boil down to the same thing - as I said, and everyone else understood at first go.

And if you don't like "consequentialism", how about less unwieldy terminology such as "the idea that actions don't have any value except that which their consequences have".

We philosophers should really stop using such terminology and write the full thing out, just like computer folk should throw away the term "Hard Disk" and replace it with "the device in the computer where all your stuff is stored".

Guess you deserve a Ming laugh.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I did say having some pretentious academic lecture people on ethics is not useful in any way. It's pushing an agenda and opinion he has, nothing more.

Teaching ethics is not useful? Why not? Why is it pushing an agenda if ethics isn't really conducive to having an agenda.

without philosophers teaching in Universities we would have no ethics...

You did notice the smily right? Indicating it was a joke? Or do we need to send you to some sort of remedial class? <-- note: smily!

I can understand it fine, but behind each of those words he used like "consequentialism" or whatever, is no doubt another excessively long-winded philosophical definition.

It's kind of an obvious term. If he wanted to be obnoxious, he could say teleological

I'd maintain that only someone who studies philosophy would know exactly what he meant by the definition.

Boris admited he doesn't know philosophy, yet got it easily.

It's a bit tired how people keep referring to Philosophy back when it was a giant umbrella for anything related to knowledge, and somehow apply that to the trivial crap Philosophers deal with today because all of the truly useful aspects of "knowledge" have since branched out into specialized fields.

But they haven't. Everything leads back to philosophy, because it is the study of knowledge. All sciences have philosophical bases behind them. And I'd think inquiring about knowledge and truth and good stuff like that is truly useful. Just because you are a neanderthal who thinks the only thing 'useful' has practical application doesn't mean we have to accept it .

[Agathon]

And who would study topics like meaning, reference, signification and other linguistic phenomena, if not philosophers?

That's the sort of thing contemporary philosophers do.

[Spiffor]

My mother was a highschool teacher, thank you very much, before teaching technical grades and helping in the formation of future teachers.

I don't think she fits the picture in the opening post.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Spiffor
My mother was a highschool teacher, thank you very much, before teaching technical grades and helping in the formation of future teachers.

I don't think she fits the picture in the opening post.

Probably because she went to college back in the days when there were standards. This is a recent phenomenon. All the older teachers at my high school were good, it was the younger ones who weren't so hot.